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By Dr Felicity Shenton, Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE) Manager for the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) ARC North East and North Cumbria (NENC).

A Plain English summary is a clear, brief summary of the research that has been written for members of the public, rather than researchers or professionals, and creating a good, clear Plain English summary is really important if you want your work to be more widely understood.

A good quality plain English summary provides an easy to read overview of your whole study which could help you to secure funding, as well as reach a wide range of audiences with your work.

Securing funding

If you’re applying for funding,  a strong research summary will help those involved in making the decision  to have a better understanding of your research proposal, and many reviewers use this summary to inform their review of your funding application.

Decision-making teams are diverse and will include people from a wide range of backgrounds, so you need to be as clear as possible about what your research will do and who it will help.  Teams include clinicians and researchers who do not have specialist knowledge of your field as well as public reviewers.

Top tip: Remember that the summary needs to be used on its own to describe the research, without the rest of the application.

Helping others to understand and promote your work

Once your research is funded and underway, a good Plain English summary will help people to understand what you’re working on. This could include members of the public, health professionals, policy makers and the media. If they can understand your research easily, they’re more likely to share it, write about it, or make reference to it in their own work.

Top tip: Make sure you clearly describe the impact your research could make, so that it’s easy to understand in a real-world context.

Saving time

Writing a good summary right now will save you time later. Once you have a good Plain English summary, you can then use it in a number of different ways in the future – for example in public information sheets, presentations or blogs.

Top tip: The NIHR provides lots of useful advice on writing Plain English summaries which you can find here: Plain English summaries (nihr.ac.uk)

Further resources 

This useful animation (link below) provides some good hints and tips on how to write a good Plain English summary (sometimes called a Lay Summary).

Bitesize Training – How to Write a Good Lay Summary – Bing video

ARC Public Advisory Network member Dave Green recently provided a training session on how to write a Plain English summary – download the slides below.