Last updated: April 2026
Plain Writing Act compliance is the set of procedural and substantive obligations that federal executive branch agencies must fulfill to satisfy Public Law 111-274, which requires clear, understandable language in all public-facing documents. This checklist covers both the procedural requirements (appointing officials, filing reports, conducting training) and the substantive standard (actually improving document clarity) that the Center for Plain Language evaluates in its annual Federal Report Card.
The Compliance Gap: Procedure vs. Substance
Before diving into the checklist, it is important to understand a distinction that defines the current state of plain language compliance in government. The Center for Plain Language evaluates agencies on two separate dimensions: compliance procedures (did you appoint a coordinator, train employees, and file your annual report?) and writing quality (are your documents actually clear?). In its most recent review of 21 executive branch agencies, the average compliance grade was B+ while the average writing quality grade was C. Only 3 agencies received an A for writing quality, and 5 received a D or F.
This gap means that most agencies are procedurally compliant but substantively failing. Passing the procedural checklist is necessary but not sufficient. The steps below address both dimensions.
Step 1: Designate a Senior Official for Plain Writing
The Plain Writing Act requires each agency to designate one or more Senior Officials for Plain Writing. This person oversees all implementation efforts, serves as the agency's point of contact for plain language issues, and is responsible for ensuring the annual compliance report is published.
In practice, agencies typically assign this role to a communications director, a public affairs officer, or a member of the agency's policy staff. The position rarely comes with dedicated budget or headcount, which is one reason compliance efforts stall after initial implementation. OMB Memo M-11-15, the final guidance on implementing the Act, recommends that the Senior Official have sufficient authority to coordinate across all divisions that produce public-facing content.
Actionable step: Confirm your agency has a current, named Senior Official for Plain Writing listed on your agency's plain language webpage. If the individual has changed roles or left the agency, update the designation immediately. Of the 21 agencies reviewed by the Center for Plain Language, 4 had outdated or missing contact information for their plain writing official.
Step 2: Create and Maintain a Plain Language Web Page
The Act requires every covered agency to create and maintain a plain writing section on its website. This page must inform the public about the agency's compliance efforts, provide a mechanism for public feedback on document clarity, and link to the agency's annual compliance report.
Actionable step: Audit your agency's plain language page against these five criteria. Does it exist and is it findable within two clicks from your homepage? Does it name your current Senior Official? Does it include a working feedback mechanism (email address, web form, or both)? Does it link to your most recent annual compliance report? Does it link to the Federal Plain Language Guidelines at plainlanguage.gov? A 2023 review found that 30% of federal agency plain language pages had broken links, missing reports, or no feedback mechanism.
Step 3: Train Employees Who Write Public-Facing Documents
The Act requires agencies to train employees in plain language principles. OMB guidance specifies that training should cover the Federal Plain Language Guidelines and be provided to all employees who write or edit covered documents.
Most agencies fulfill this requirement through a combination of online training modules (the Federal Plain Language Guidelines website offers free resources), in-person workshops, and periodic refresher sessions. The Center for Plain Language offers a community of practice through the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN), which hosts monthly meetings and training resources.
Actionable step: Document which employees have received plain language training, when they received it, and which curriculum was used. If your agency relies solely on a one-time onboarding module, consider implementing annual refresher training. Agencies that scored an A for writing quality in the Center for Plain Language's report card universally had recurring training programs, not one-time orientations.
Step 4: Inventory Your Covered Documents
This is the step most agencies skip — and it is the most consequential for substantive compliance. Before you can improve your documents, you must know what documents you have. The Act defines covered documents broadly: any document necessary for obtaining a federal benefit or service, providing information about a benefit or service, or explaining how to comply with a government requirement.
For most federal agencies, the covered document corpus includes thousands of web pages, hundreds of PDF forms and publications, mailed notices, email templates, and phone scripts. A mid-size federal agency typically maintains 12,000 to 50,000 public-facing pages. Without a centralized inventory, agencies cannot systematically assess which documents meet plain language standards and which do not.
Actionable step: Conduct a comprehensive crawl of your agency's public-facing web properties, PDF repositories, and form libraries. Build an inventory that includes document title, URL or file location, publication date, last revision date, owning office, and estimated annual audience (page views, downloads, or mailing volume). This inventory becomes the foundation for prioritized remediation.
Step 5: Score Your Documents Against Federal Plain Language Guidelines
Once you have an inventory, score each document against the multi-dimensional criteria in the Federal Plain Language Guidelines. These criteria include audience appropriateness, logical organization, use of active voice, sentence and paragraph length, jargon and acronym usage, clear headings, use of lists and tables, and actionability.
A common mistake is relying solely on automated readability scores like Flesch-Kincaid. While these provide a useful baseline, they measure only sentence length and word complexity. A document can score at a 7th-grade reading level and still fail on organization, jargon, and actionability. The Center for Plain Language's grading methodology evaluates all dimensions, and your scoring should do the same.
Actionable step: Prioritize scoring by public impact. Start with your 50 highest-traffic web pages, your 20 most-downloaded forms, and any documents associated with your agency's highest-volume citizen interactions. AI-powered compliance auditing platforms can score documents across all Federal Plain Language Guidelines dimensions at scale, replacing the manual review process that previously limited agencies to sampling a handful of documents per year.
Step 6: Remediate Priority Documents
Remediation means rewriting flagged documents to meet plain language standards. This is the most resource-intensive step and the one where most agencies stall. The federal PLAIN network estimates that remediating a single complex document requires 8 to 40 hours of work, depending on length, technical complexity, and stakeholder review requirements.
Effective remediation follows a consistent process: identify the document's primary audience, determine what action the reader needs to take, reorganize content to follow the reader's decision path, replace jargon with common language, shorten sentences and paragraphs, add clear headings and subheadings, and test with representative readers when possible.
Actionable step: Establish a remediation queue ranked by public impact. Set a target of remediating your top 10 highest-impact documents within the first 90 days. Track remediation status (flagged, in progress, reviewed, published) in a shared system visible to your Senior Official. Agencies that scored highest in the Center for Plain Language's report card treated remediation as a continuous program with quarterly targets, not a one-time project.
Step 7: Publish Your Annual Compliance Report
The Act requires each agency to publish an annual report describing its continuing compliance with the law. The report must appear on the agency's plain language webpage. OMB Memo M-11-15 specifies that the report should describe training activities, document improvements, public feedback received, and plans for the coming year.
Actionable step: Auto-generate as much of your annual report as possible from your compliance dashboard data. The report should include the total number of covered documents inventoried, the percentage scored against Federal Plain Language Guidelines, the number remediated during the reporting period, a summary of training activities and employee participation, public feedback received and actions taken, and goals for the next reporting period. Agencies that use compliance platforms to generate these reports spend an estimated 75% less staff time on the annual filing than agencies that compile reports manually.
Step 8: Establish Continuous Monitoring
Compliance is not a one-time event. Government agencies publish new content continuously — new web pages, updated forms, revised notices, new regulatory guidance. Without ongoing monitoring, an agency that achieves compliance in January can fall below standards by March as new, unreviewed content accumulates.
Actionable step: Implement a process (manual or automated) that reviews all new public-facing content before publication against plain language criteria, and periodically rescans your existing corpus to catch content that may have been revised without review. Continuous monitoring is the mechanism that converts plain language from a project into a program — and it is the capability that distinguishes agencies with sustained high grades from those that cycle between improvement and regression.
gpt.us.org automates steps 4 through 8 of this checklist through AI-powered corpus ingestion, multi-dimensional scoring, prioritized remediation, compliance dashboards, and continuous monitoring. Request a free compliance assessment →