“Can we make this simpler?”

It’s a question I’ve heard approximately 47,000 times in my healthcare advertising career. It usually happens during a creative review, often after several rounds of revisions, and occasionally from someone who just added three more mandatory claims to the piece. The answer is almost always yes, but first, we need to agree on what simpler actually means.

Somewhere along the way, simple became shorthand for shorter—fewer words, smaller sentences, less science, and maybe a headline that fits neatly into two lines instead of three. None of those things necessarily makes copy easier to understand. I’ve seen perfectly good healthcare copy stripped down until it technically communicates the approved message but leaves the reader with almost no idea what they’re supposed to take away from it. Which raises an interesting question: If we’ve made something shorter but harder to understand, what exactly have we accomplished?

The problem isn’t that healthcare brands want simplicity—it’s that simplicity is often confused for an absence of complexity. Healthcare is complicated. The science is complicated. The decisions people make about their health can be complicated, too. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

A patient who’s just been diagnosed with a chronic condition may need a straightforward explanation of what’s happening in their body. Someone who’s been living with that condition for 15 years may already understand the science and want to know how a particular treatment fits into their life. And an HCP certainly doesn’t need every scientific term replaced with a friendlier alternative. Sometimes the precise medical language is exactly what makes the message clear. That’s why I get a little twitchy when someone suggests we simplify copy by lowering the reading level or removing technical terminology. Those can be useful strategies, but they’re not substitutes for understanding the audience.

The real work happens when you figure out what the reader already knows, what they need to know, and what might be standing in the way of understanding. It happens when you spend an hour untangling a complicated mechanism of action so you can explain it accurately in two sentences. And it happens when you realize that the approved claim everyone wants to feature doesn’t mean much without a little context.

Sometimes the shortest version of a message is also the least useful—a few extra words can connect the dots, an example can make an abstract concept tangible, and a well-placed transition can keep a reader from having to go back and reread the previous paragraph. That’s where experience and creative judgment come in. Knowing which words can change, which ones can’t, and when to push back because the technically accurate version isn’t doing its job isn’t always easy. Sometimes the approved language is awkward. Sometimes the claim needs more explanation than anyone wants to give it. And sometimes the best solution is to find a better way to organize the information, rather than rewriting the headline.

I’m almost always happy to try to simplify things when it makes sense, but I’m probably going to ask a few questions first. What isn’t working? Is the message confusing? Is there too much information? Are we using language the audience won’t understand? Or do we just want fewer words because the layout feels crowded? Those are very different problems that require very different solutions.

Look at it this way—simple copy isn’t copy that asks less of the writer. It’s copy that asks less of the reader, and getting there takes a hell of a lot more than deleting adjectives.