Yesterday we received a letter from our housebuilder about some work being done at the end of our road.
I'm a native English speaker with a master's degree-level of education, and I had to read the letter three times to understand what it said.
What about if this letter actually read like this?
Dear homeowner,
We need to install a foul/sewer main in your development.
We need to dig up some of [road name] and some communal grass to do this. There will be no cost to you, and the areas dug up will be returned to their previous state once we are finished.
You might want to allow a few extra minutes to deal with any temporary traffic lights or diversions.
If you have any questions, please email [contact email address].
Instead, the letter is full of corporate and industry jargon, and words that add nothing to the meaning and just puff out the sentence.
Communications with customers need to be:
clear
concise
easily understood.
In the UK the average reading age is between nine and 11 years old. That means that if you want to communicate effectively with your audience, you should be writing for pre-teen level.
How many ten year olds understand words like "remediated" or terms like "adopted road"?
I'm not sharing this example to poke fun at the company in question. This kind of customer communication is rife across society.
"But what if I'm writing for experts?" I hear you say. Well, there are some cases where you will need to use language which is technical or advanced. But I'd caution you to consider whether that is truly your only audience. If you want anyone other than your immediate peers to read what you've created, you need to change how you speak to them. There are really very few occasions where you can truly justify using only advanced or technical ways of writing.
If you're looking for good examples of organisational communications which factor in simple English, look at the NHS. NHS Inform (in Scotland) or NHS UK (in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) has some fantastic content which is easily understood by the majority of people. They don't use medical terminology - they said "poo" and "pee" because that is language which most people understand. (there's two words I never saw myself posting on my website!).
It's not your customer's job to make sense of what you're sharing with them. It's yours, to make sure the information can be easily understood.
Attention from your audiences is precious - don't waste it.
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