Whether you are creating a proposal to a new client, or writing instructions on how to safely ingest a couple of painkillers, it's important that you write in plain English to avoid misleading phrases and ambiguous text. A prime example of how we have all been using and reading clumsy text is evident on most warning labels accompanying medication: an area that should never create confusion when it comes to understanding instruction. This is just one type of communication that is currently being reviewed because words such as "drowsiness" and "avoid" are too confusing for the modern world, experts claim. With two million prescriptions being issued every day, a small percentage improvement through labels being more understandable could make a significant impact

Research by the British National Formulary (BNF), which advises doctors, nurses and pharmacists, found labelling that has been around for decades is now too difficult for members of the public to understand. Phrases such as "may cause drowsiness" are no longer readily understood and should now be simplified to say "this medicine may make you sleepy". Likewise, the phrases "avoid alcoholic drink" and "take at regular intervals" caused indecision among today's public. The report recommended the labels should now read "do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine" and "space the doses evenly throughout the day".

Thanks to technology, it has never been easier to change labels on medicines using computerised systems. The revised phrases are included in a new, updated version of the BNF and means that the software used by large pharmacy chains and independent pharmacist to print instruction labels should be updated regularly in the near future.

This brings us on to another cause of confusion in our language: the old cliché. While thinking about writing in plain English, we should also try to (note: never try and) avoid clichés. A cliché is like a light switch − as soon as we hear a cliché, however, we tend to switch off, not on, to any information that follows. A recent survey across 70 counties identified the following as the most annoying clichés in everyday English language: 24/7, address the issue, basically, ballpark figure, in terms of, pushing the envelope, to be honest/to be honest with you/to be perfectly honest, and (of thought to be of no literally value) value-added. 'At the end of the day' was voted as the most irritating phrase in the English language. Second place in the vote was shared by 'at this moment in time' and the constant use of 'like' as if it were a form of punctuation. 'With all due respect' came fourth.

Microsoft Office Word 2010 comes with an array of professional tools to help you edit all of your documents, finding those grammatical errors and spelling mistakes with easy to use search and replace, and formatting tools. In Word 2010 you can copy and paste content in many formats and there's an advanced preview before you paste facility. And also new in Word 2010, are advanced editing techniques allowing you to quickly find your way around long documents.

You can easily reorganise your documents by dragging and dropping headings instead of copying and pasting. You can also delete, cut, or copy headings and their content. And you can find content by using incremental search, so you do not need to know exactly what you are searching for to find it. There's also the ability to move between headings in your document by clicking on the parts of the document map. And you can collapse levels of the outline to hide nested headings, so you can work easily with the map even in deeply structured and complicated long documents.

When it comes to dealing with fiddly layout options, Word 2010 has the easy to use tools to allow you to work with text headings to promote or demote a given heading, or a heading and all of its nested headings, up or down within the hierarchy. It's even easy to add new headings to your document to build a basic outline, even to insert new headings without having to scroll around in the document.

And if you need to make sure you are aware of the content being edited by others, there is advanced browsing facilities allowing you to identify the headings that contain a co-authoring indicator.

Incidentally, the words "drowsiness" and "drowsy" are thought to date back to 1520 probably from the word drusan or drusian "to sink," also "become languid, slow, or inactive" which are related to dreosan "to fall". As phrases such as "may cause drowsiness" are no longer readily understood and should now be simplified, it's a good time to review how your creative content reads, and to take it out of the dark ages.