Plain Language, Lived Experience and AI: Keeping Your Voice in the Process
AI can make your writing clearer and more accessible — but it can also erase your tone, emotion, and voice if you let it. This guide is about using AI to support your clarity while protecting the soul of your lived experience writing.
“Good writing” in systems often means neat sentences, formal tone, tidy dot points, and emotional restraint. But lived experience isn’t tidy. It arrives as interrupted stories, repetition, humour, grief, and anger. When AI smooths everything down, it can turn something alive into something sterile. This guide helps you use AI to clarify without erasing yourself.
What Do We Mean by “Plain Language”?
Plain language is writing that is easy to read and understand, uses everyday words, keeps sentences short, and makes the main point clear early. It helps when writing to services, complaint bodies, or time-poor readers.
Plain language is not: baby talk, “dumbing down”, or pretending complex things are simple. It’s respect — clarity without condescension.
The Problem: “Professional” Language Can Erase Lived Experience
AI tools are often trained on bureaucratic and corporate text. When used carelessly, they:
- soften strong statements into vague ones,
- remove emotion,
- add jargon that you’d never say out loud.
Original: “They kept cancelling and I felt like I didn’t matter.”
AI version: “There were recurrent cancellations, which negatively impacted my sense of being valued as a client.”
The meaning’s still there — but the person is gone.
Your goal is not to reject “professional” language completely, but to decide when it serves your message and when it flattens it.
How AI Can Help (If You Set the Rules)
AI can help you untangle, shorten, or structure your writing — if you tell it clearly how to behave. For example:
“Here is my text. Please:
- make it easier to read,
- keep my tone and key phrases,
- do not add jargon or make it sound like a report,
- and do not remove the emotional truth of what I’m saying.”
If it still sounds too formal, you can push back: “Please rewrite this in simpler, everyday language, and keep at least three of my original phrases.”
Keeping Your Own Phrases and Metaphors
Protect the words that carry your truth. Make a list of phrases you don’t want altered, such as:
- “I felt invisible in the room.”
- “Everything became noise.”
- “I kept falling through gaps they wouldn’t admit were there.”
Then tell AI:
“These phrases are important to me. When rewriting, keep them or build around them.”
Check the result. If your phrases vanish or get softened, paste them back in. You don’t owe AI compliance.
Making Things Clearer Without Sanding Off Emotion
Original:
“I’m so tired of all of this and it’s like I’m screaming into a void. I keep explaining what’s happening, and they say they understand but then nothing changes and I’m the one who has to pick up the pieces every single time.”
Good rewrite:
“I am exhausted. I keep explaining what is happening, and staff say they understand, but nothing changes. Each time, I’m left to pick up the pieces. It feels like shouting into a void.”
The language is cleaner, but the feeling remains. That’s the goal.
When You Want Two Versions: “System-Facing” and “Heart-Facing”
- Write your heart version first — messy, emotional, and real.
- Ask AI for a system version: “Please create a system-facing version that keeps the facts and impact, uses plain language, avoids pity or blame, and removes only unnecessary detail.”
- Keep both. The system version communicates; the heart version anchors you.
Letting AI Help with Accessibility and Plain Language
Lived experience work often reaches people with fatigue, trauma, or cognitive barriers. Plain language is care. You can ask:
“Here is a process explanation. Please rewrite it for someone who is tired, stressed, or overloaded. Use short sentences and dot points. Keep accuracy. Don’t talk down.”
Then refine it to make sure it’s trauma-aware and culturally relevant.
Protecting Identity Language and Labels
AI often defaults to “safe” or institutional terms. You can teach it your preferences:
“Keep the terms ‘disabled people’, ‘autistic people’, and ‘Mad community’. Avoid phrases like ‘vulnerable populations’ or ‘consumers’.”
Then check the result for any unwanted substitutions — and replace them with language that feels right to you.
Working with Repetition: When to Keep It, When to Trim It
Repetition can carry truth or signal trauma. Ask AI to trim carefully:
“Please reduce unnecessary repetition, but keep the main points, the sense of long struggle, and one clear statement about how tired I am of repeating myself.”
That way, the writing gains flow without losing history or feeling.
Using AI as a Mirror, Not a Judge
AI can help you reflect, not decide. Ask it:
“Please list in five bullet points what you think my main messages are. Don’t rewrite yet.”
Then compare those bullets to your intent. If something vital is missing, strengthen that part of your text — not your tone.
Emotional Safety: Choosing When Not to Polish
Sometimes, leaving a piece raw is the truest choice. You can use AI only for technical touches — checking dates, breaking sections, or fixing typos — and leave the emotion untouched. You’re not required to make everything smooth.
A Small Checklist: AI, Plain Language and My Voice
- Does this still sound like me?
- Have feelings been washed out?
- Is there jargon I’d never use aloud?
- Would my community recognise themselves here?
- Is the message clear enough for someone under stress?
If anything feels off, restore a phrase, drop a corporate word, or reinsert emotion. Small fixes can bring you back.
A Gentle Way to Practise Keeping Your Voice
- Write a short paragraph about something small but real.
- Ask AI to rewrite it in clearer language but keep your tone.
- Compare what it changed and what it kept.
- Adjust your instructions and try again.
You’ll learn how to guide AI — and when to reclaim the keyboard.
Your lived experience is not a draft to be tidied by AI. It’s the original source. Plain language is a tool for access, not a filter to make you acceptable. AI can assist, but you remain the author of your own voice.