This article juxtaposes the reflections on the expectations from plain language as declared by the participants of workshops delivered by the Jasnopis team with the status of linguistic research on phenomena such as linguistic awareness, linguistic norm, or attitudes towards language. These arguments serve the purpose of proposing a comprehensive approach to text, which positions the recipient in the centre of works on plain language, which allows for the output of other disciplines of knowledge and requires cooperation between experts and practitioners in a given field, text recipients, and linguists/editors. Such an approach is put forward also by the plain language ISO standard (due for publication), which encourages examination of a text together with its recipients and employment of non-linguistic information design techniques. Keywords: plain language – ISO 24495-1 – comprehensive approach to text.