5 Things you should know about... Making your documents clear
Why?
The documents you write form the voice of your brand. So when someone reads your documents, their subconscious conducts a reality check on the claims your organisation makes about itself — claims about being, say, “innovative” and “customer-focused”.
If your readers find your documents hard to understand, then your documents are likely to sabotage your brand.
Here are some guidelines to help you make your documents clear.
1. How?
When trying to write clearly, you need to think rigorously about:
- your audience — who are you writing to: customers, staff, suppliers, investors, regulators? Then ask yourself: is your audience friendly, cold, opposed, etc?
- your purpose — why are you writing to them: to advise, to persuade, to inform, to educate, to extract information, to regulate behaviour etc?
Let your answers to those questions determine the style and tone of your writing.
Curiously, even though we all have many audiences and purposes for writing, most of us end up using the one writing style most of the time we write. We develop a work-voice and we use it regardless of who we are writing to and why. That makes it harder to achieve our purpose.
Having clearly understood our audience and our purpose, we need to think about the document’s content, language, structure and design.
2. Content
What information is the audience looking for? What information do you want to convey? Do those 2 align? If they don’t align, then the chances are that the reader won’t read what you write.
3. Language
When writing sentences:
- Use the right language for the communication and the reader.
- Use simple words and everyday language – eg “end” rather than “terminate”, “about” rather than “in relation to”.
- Explain any jargon your reader will find unfamiliar.
- Use an informal personal tone – ie “you”, “your”, “we”, “our” rather than “the customer”, or “the company”.
- Use the active voice, eg “We will send you the document” rather than “the document will be sent”.
- Use verbs instead of nouns, ie “we will pay you on Friday” rather than “we will arrange the payment Friday”.
- Use a positive tone – ie “we will process your application when we receive the requirements” rather than “we can’t process your application until we receive the requirements”.
- Use short sentences— try to have fewer than 25 words in a sentence. (You should be embarrassed if you write more than one 40+ word sentence every few pages.)
- Link sentences carefully to maintain the flow of conversation.
- If you have a long sentence, check if it contains more than one idea. If it does:
o try putting a full stop between ideas — then tweak the text to preserve the flow. Generally, You should have only one idea in each sentence; or
o try putting each idea in separate dot points that flow from some introductory text.
- Remove unnecessary words from every sentence — short or long. For example, instead of writing “A director must have regard to . . .” , write “A director must consider . . .”. George Orwell famously said: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”.
- By the way, these tips are only guidelines. Sometimes, you’ll need to breach them — just as this document does.
4. Structure
When working out the order in which to put your information:
- Use an opening that attracts interest and summarises the reason for writing.
- Put the main message at the start of a document, a chapter, a section.
- Present information in an order that makes most sense to the reader.
- Group related information.
- Use meaningful headings that convey key messages, or that ask questions, readers will find engaging.
- Make sure headings accurately describe the information they head — if you change topic, then you need a new heading.
- Use lots of headings — it’s hard to use too many.
5. Design
- Use lots of white space –in margins, above headings and between lines/paragraphs.
- Use tables, charts, lists and dot points to break information and help people access the information.
- Distinguish headings from body text to indicate the hierarchical structure of the communication.
Call Christopher Balmford at Words & Beyond/Cleardocs on (03) 9429 8062 if you want assistance in making your documents clear or David Carter at Carter Lawyers on (03) 8646-3866 if you want assistance in drafting your legal documents.
The information contained in [5] Things you should know about… Making your documents clear, is for your general information only and should not be relied upon as specific legal advice. You should consult your lawyer, accountant or other adviser to obtain advice to suit your needs.
© David Carter and Christopher Balmford 2010
03 9429-8062
CARTER LAWYERS
Level 1, 159 Dorcas Street
South Melbourne Vic 3205
Ph: 8646-3833