Quick tip: Rephrase negatives into positives

Here’s an easy tip to help you write more clearly: if you can, rephrase negatives into positives. This is especially useful when you’re writing instructions and test or survey questions.

Here’s a tip that I certainly never thought about until I started learning about plain language: rephrase negative sentences as positives, when you can. It will help your readers more easily understand you. (Edited 22 June 2024.¹)

A “negative” in this context means saying that something is not the case (see Merriam-Webster’s definition for “negate”²). The most obvious example is when you use the word “not”:

Other words that indicate negation include:

• no
• except
• less than
• avoid
• undo
• words starting with “un-“, like unnecessary, unless

Why are negatives harder to understand than positives?

You may think that simple negatives are easy to understand, but Martin Cutts, in his Oxford Guide to Plain English, says:

When readers are faced with a negative, they must first imagine the positive alternative, and then mentally cancel it out.

Martin Cutts, Oxford Guide to Plain English, 2020, p. 93

A 2024 study (Arianna Zuanazzi et al. 2024) verified that the brain indeed goes through two steps when it reads the word “not”: it processes the affirmative first, before modifying its interpretation.

Eliminate that extra mental work and readers will be able to more easily understand your writing—especially if they have low literacy levels in that language, a print disability, or temporary impairments, or if they face any other barriers.

Beware of double negatives

Especially terrible are double negatives, which cancel each other in meaning. As a young teen, I couldn’t read Jane Austen novels because of all the double negatives. For example:

… it is not unlikely that he should be at Mrs. Goddard’s to-day

Jane Austen, Emma

The “not” and “un-” are the double negatives. I would mentally cross those out to come up with “it is likely that he should be at Mrs. Goddard’s to-day.”

Reading Jane Austen is for fun; if I misunderstand a sentence here and there, it’s not going to harm me. But using confusing double negatives is unforgivable in documents that people must read to function in life. (That’s why plain language is a civil right.)

Positively phrase instructions and questions

Rephrasing as positives is especially effective when giving instructions or questions on a test or survey. For example, compare these sentences. Which do you find easier to understand?

Or imagine you have the following multiple-choice questions in a test:

There may be a subtle difference between the two questions, but reflect whether that difference is important to you.

Exception: Use “not” for prohibitions

When prohibiting something, it’s fine to use “do not” and “must not.” In fact, those phrases are recommended in Simplified Technical English, which is used for technical documentation and meant to be easily used by non-English speakers. (See the section on strong prohibitions in technical writing, on Wikiversity.)

I guess “Do not get wet” (subtext: “or you will be electrocuted and die”) is more powerful than “Keep dry” (“unless you want to be electrocuted and die”—ha, I found the negative!) ⚡

How to rephrase negatives to positives

To rephrase your negatives into positives, take out your “not”s and imagine what the positive version might be.

Martin Cutts notes that

• “not less than” can be replaced with “at least”
• “not” and “except” can be saved with “only”

Some examples:

Resources

• Claire Turner, “How ‘not’ changes everything: Brain interprets negated adjectives,” lay summary, NeuroscienceNews.com, 30 May 2024. The original open-access study: Arianna Zuanazzi, Pablo Ripollés, Wy Ming Lin, Laura Gwilliams, Jean-Rémi King, and David Poeppel, “Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives,” PLOS Biology, 30 May 2024.
• Use positive language (plainlanguage.gov). Concise and very clear, this PlainLanguage.gov page has some great (terrible?) examples of negatives and how you might rephrase them.
• Clear communication: choose positive over negative phrasing (Government of Canada)
• Martin Cutt’s Oxford Guide to Plain Language (affiliate link), Oxford Press: 2020. See chapter 9 on “Converting negative to positive”