July 29, 2026
Plain English, spicy comments
Ads-STE100: Simplified Technical English
The internet spots a rulebook for clearer writing — then immediately asks who owns it
TLDR: A 2025 update to ASD-STE100, a rulebook for writing clearer repair manuals, is out and still aims to make instructions easier for non-native English speakers. The main community reaction wasn’t praise for the rules — it was a pointed question about whether a truly open, freely reusable version exists.
A decades-old rulebook for writing clearer technical manuals just got its latest 2025 refresh, and the crowd reaction was instantly less “wow, cool aviation history” and more “okay, but can regular people actually use this?” ASD-STE100 is basically a very strict version of English built so aircraft and repair instructions are easier to understand, especially for people who don’t speak English as a first language. It now has 53 writing rules and about 900 approved words, which sounds tidy, useful, and also like the kind of thing the internet would side-eye on sight.
That side-eye arrived fast. The biggest mood in the comments was curiosity mixed with suspicion about openness: if this is supposed to help everyone write more clearly, is there an open version, or is this another useful standard locked behind gatekeepers? One commenter went straight for the practical question and asked whether there’s a Creative Commons-style open standard for it, while name-dropping old-school plain-language guru Rudolf Flesch like a professor entering a food fight. That one comment basically stole the show, because it turned a sleepy documentation standard into a mini-drama about access, ownership, and whether “simple English” can ever stay simple once committees get involved.
The humor here is dry but delicious: the internet has discovered a giant manual about making writing easier to read, and its first reaction is to ask for a simpler, freer manual about the manual. Honestly? Fair.
Key Points
- •ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English is a controlled language standard designed to simplify and clarify technical documentation, originally for aircraft maintenance manuals.
- •The January 2025 edition of the standard contains 53 writing rules and a dictionary of about 900 approved words.
- •The standard originated from work begun by AECMA in 1983 after the European airline industry sought more readable and standardized English documentation.
- •The first guide was released in 1985, and after AECMA became part of ASD in 2004, the specification was renamed ASD-STE100 and later described as an international standard with Issue 9.
- •ASD-STE100 is maintained by ASD’s Simplified Technical English Maintenance Group, has been free since 2013, and the article says 18,981 copies of Issues 6-8 and nearly 1,000 copies of Issue 9 had been distributed by March 2025.