How To Organise The Information In Documents: The Guiding Principles - Part 2

Here then are the goals, the guiding principles:

* put the main message first;

* put closely related material together;

* put material in an order that makes the best sense to the reader;

* use headings liberally and rigorously;

* make sure that pieces of information with comparable heading levels have comparable weight, and comparable levels of importance; and

* use a numbering system which forces you to draft clearly — even if you don't use that numbering system when you print the document.

These principles are discussed in considerably more detail in a later part of this series of articles. But for now, just keep them in mind as we review some documents.

The Problems
Let's look at three examples that illustrate the problems created by poor structure. Those problems are many and varied. Usually they result from an utter failure to focus on things from the reader's point of view.

Example 1: Voicemail Instructions
This ugly little document was handed to me when I started work somewhere. It's for people to pin up near their phone to help them when they need to turn their voicemail on.

5. CALL FORWARDING

You will need to instruct voice mail when you would like your phone answered. This can be done via 3 call forward options:

CANCEL EXISTING FORWARDING

BUSY CALLS | Press # 3 | Hang up

NO ANSWER CALLS | Press #6 | Hang up

ALL CALLS | Press #9 | Hang up


SET FORWARDING TO VOICE MAIL

BUSY CALLS | Press # 3 76999 | Hang up

NO ANSWER CALLS | Press #6 76999 | Hang up

ALL CALLS | Press #9 76999 | Hang up

It's not a pretty sight! The language isn't too flash either. But what I want to focus on is the structure — the order in which the ideas are presented.

First, the results of some real-life research — my experiences as a user of the sheet. For my first few days in the organisation, I never got one voicemail message, even though several friends told me that when they rang me to see how I was doing in my new job, the phone rang out. I assumed I'd done something silly, and so I reset my phone to voicemail. Still no messages.

Clearly, something was wrong. I examined the sheet more carefully and realised that every time I'd tried to turn voicemail on, I'd actually turned it off.

Why? Because I didn't read the sheet very carefully, and I had assumed that the sheet dealt with things in what I thought was a logical order:

*first, how to turn voicemail on; and

* second, how to turn voicemail off.

I paid the penalty for not reading the sheet carefully.

But lots of readers don't read carefully. We need to create documents that people can't misread — even if they aren't really concentrating and don't read every word carefully. It's a tall order.

Let's look at the voicemail instruction sheet again:

* "Cancel existing forwarding", which means "Turning your voicemail off"

is dealt with before

* "Set forwarding to voicemail", which means "Turning your voicemail on".

Surely, that order is counter-intuitive? Surely, a new user of any machine (or a new user of a machine's — dare I say it — "functionality") wants to know how to turn it on before they want to know how to turn it off? Not only that, but they expect to be told the information in that order.

By the way, you can turn voicemail on even if the phone is already set to some other call forwarding. You don't have to turn off the call forwarding first — I checked.

How To Organise The Information In Documents: Getting the Structure Right - Part 1

Process, Paradigm, and Persistence

The Need
We need more information about how to organise the information in documents. We have lots of information on language and a fair bit on design; but there isn’t so much on structure. Also, what we do have on structure tends to be more about the hallmarks of a well-structured document rather than about how to create one — more about the goals themselves than how to score them.

The Difficulty
The hardest part of making documents as clear as they can be is getting the structure right. It is for me anyway.

* Where to start?
* Which ideas to group together?
* What order to put them in?

It's the same whether I am writing an insurance policy, a prospectus, a letter of advice to a client, an essay for university, or an article for Clarity. Part of the problem is that — even with a clear idea of my audience and the purpose for writing — I'm not always sure just what I'm going to say, just where it is that I'm going.

The struggle to remove that insecurity eases as soon as the structure comes good — although the structure may morph several times as other issues, and my thinking, become clearer.

The Importance
Getting the structure right is vital if a document is going to be useful for its audience. As the Law Reform Commission of Victoria has said:

The success of a document in communicating depends greatly on the careful organisation of the material in it. The right facts must not only be selected, but must also be put in an order that shows the interconnections between the facts, that allows one fact to support or qualify the other. Incisive clarity of thinking, sensitive consideration of the audience, skilful choice of language, and thoughtful attention to all the other components in the writing process can all be undermined by slipshod organisation. [Law Reform Commission of Victoria, Plain English and the Law, Appendix 1, Drafting Manual 1987, page 17]

Absolute rigour is essential. Poor structure often reflects muddled thinking. And muddled thinking causes communications to fail.

These Articles
The first part of this series sets the scene and considers three examples that reveal the problems of poor structure.

The latter parts deal with:

* discussing a process and a paradigm for achieving the goals of good structure; and
* contains a detailed analysis of a before-and-after example.

I should say right at the outset that much of the material about the process and paradigm discussed in Part 2 is from others — notably Bryan A. Garner (from an article about a paradigm developed by Dr. Betty S. Flowers), Professor Joseph Kimble, and the Law Reform Commission of Victoria (the work being done by the Commission's chair, David Kelly). The purpose of this article is to bring their ideas together, add some of my own, and perhaps encourage others to contribute their thoughts.

If enough people share their ideas, we could effectively have a "Seminar in Print" dealing with structure.

Conclusion : Plain Language: beyond a ‘movement’ - Part 10

Plain language has grown beyond being a movement to become a product, a business, an industry, or a professional service. In the early twenty-first Century, it is almost misleading for plain-language practitioners to talk about their product as a movement.

Yet much remains to be done to improve the clarity of legal, and related, documents. The success to date has been achieved by focussing on:

• traditionally, the social benefits of clear legal communication; and
• more recently, the economic benefits.

These must remain key focuses. But progress has been, as my 11 year old son and 8 year old daughter would have it, "way slow Dad, in fact double way slow".

In too many organizations, important writing tasks are left to someone with other core skills—eg, legal, marketing, or customer service skills.

Also, although many people in many organizations—especially law firms—write for a substantial percentage of their working day, their writing skills are rarely enhanced and even more rarely measured. How can that be? Why is it so?

Yet, every person who writes for an organization helps form the voice of that organization's brand—they are its custodians, champions, and guardians. And for some organizations, the voice of the brand is fundamentally important.

We need to reposition plain language in the eyes of decision-makers in businesses, in law firms, and in government. We need to show those decision-makers that with plain language, their organization's documents can satisfy and delight everyone who reads those documents. That is so whether the reader is a client, a customer, a patient, a staff member, a distributor, a supplier, a regulator, a judge, an investor, a litigant, or someone reading the law.

To help those decision-makers determine whether the style of their organization's documents is helping or hindering their organization, we should encourage them to measure those documents against their organization's brand values.

It's fairly easy to do that measuring. First, simply ask the people in an organization to comment on their documents. Usually, they say things like "wordy", "formal", "heavy", "repetitive", "worse than boring" etc. Sometimes people go much further than that. Then compare those comments with the organization's brand promise, its values, mission etc. Usually, the gap between their comments and the brand is huge.

After the measuring, we should ask decision-makers:

• "How important is the voice of your brand?
• "Is your brand's voice aligned with your brand?"
• "How well is the voice of your brand being managed?"
• "Does your organization's structure promote a focus on clarity?"
• "Who in your organization is responsible for how the document's audience receives the message?"
• "Would clearer documents help your organization succeed?"

All of that should help deliver the economic and social benefits of clear communication—because the long-term solutions to the problems of poor communication lie in organizations competing (at least to some extent) on the basis of the plainness of their documents.

Delivering plain language: structure and responsibilities : Plain Language: beyond a ‘movement’ - Part 9

Although there is neither the room, nor the need, to say much here about causing organizational cultural change, there are two points worth making because they are particularly related to communication.


9.1 Someone to take responsibility for how the audience receives the message

In most organisations, a team of people contribute to the style and content of a document. Between them, those people have a range of roles. For example, in a financial services organization, those roles typically include: a product manager, a lawyer, an actuary, someone from marketing, someone from customer service, someone representing the distributors who actually deal with potential customers, a designer, someone responsible for some research, a project manager, someone from IT, a printer, … and often a few more.

Yet there is no one whose job is to take responsibility for how the audience will receive the message.

Organisations need to give someone that responsibility. There needs to be someone representing the document's audience who is prepared to sign-off (after any necessary testing):

• that most members of the document's audience will be able to use the document to do what they need to do—that is, that the document works for its audience and its purpose; and
• that the document will enhance the organisation's brand.

The questions then arise: Who should that person report to? How do they fit into the team?

9.2 Structuring an organisation to show the importance of communication

In my experience, the person that coordinates the creation of documents is usually the Product Manager. That seems to be a mistake to me.

Instead, the various contributors to the document should be coordinated by the person responsible for how the audience will receive the message. This is particularly so for documents relating to intangibles.

This matters because for so many intangibles the customer "sees" the product only through the organization's communications. Therefore, the communications are of the utmost importance.

Consider a customer trying to choose a financial services product. There is nothing for the customer to "see" without the documents that describe the product. So the key to achieving "customer focus" is to get the documents right for the reader.

Therefore, the person who "takes responsibility for how the audience receives the message" needs to be in charge of the document's development.

It is that person who should be deciding:

• what's in and what's out;
• the order in which information is to be presented;
• what the headings are going to be;
• the style and tone of the language;
• the look and feel of the document.

The other people involved should be merely contributing material, and checking for accuracy etc.

This structure will also help to emphasise internally the importance the organisation places on the clarity of its communications. By itself, that emphasis will generate energy and momentum that will help the organisation produce clear documents that enhance its brand.

A possible new position for plain language : Plain Language: beyond a ‘movement’ - Part 8

Plain language is a movement no more. The legal profession has known this for some time. However, in the minds of key decision-makers in business and government, plain language is too often still seen as a movement. We need to remedy that by repositioning plain language in the minds of those decision-makers. It's worth doing because those people bare responsibility for enabling plain language to be implemented—and plain language has benefits for all.

Progress depends on plain language acknowledging its success and how that success has changed it. But what position should plain language seek to occupy?

As a threshold issue, we need to establish the aim of the repositioning. I suggest that the aim is to further deliver the social and economic benefits of plain language:

• to a wider audience of consumers and readers of documents; and
• to a greater number of the organizations that rely on documents to administer and manage their operations.

(It's purely a side benefit that businesses like mine may be able to grow as a result of the increased success of plain language. Oh yes, purely a side benefit.)

The repositioning might start with clarifying how we conceive plain-language. Let's start the clarification process with the documents, where it all begins.

I see the documents that an organization—whether a business, a government body, or a law firm—produces and relies on as forming the "voice of the organization's brand". For that statement to make sense, we need to think about two things: "voice" and "brand". Let's think about voice first.

8.1 Voice
Each time we speak, the voice we use is heavily influenced by our audience and our purpose: whom we are talking to and why. For example, we use different voices to talk to our pet, to our mother, to our boss and—if we are a lawyer in private practice—to our clients. As a lawyer, we probably use quite different voices for different sorts of clients.

At the same time, the voice we use depends on our purpose. For example, the voice an employee lawyer in a law firm uses to talk to the managing partner:

• in a conversation at a social function about how fantastic it is that the firm just won a major pitch for a new client with much, interesting, lucrative, and challenging work for all;
is very different from the voice that same employee lawyer would use:
• at their annual performance review to ask for a 25% bonus, a 30% pay rise and whether they can work out of the London office for a couple of months a year—business class travel will be fine thanks.

That's how our audience and purpose influence our voice when we speak.

But when most lawyers write, they do so without thinking about the who and the why. They put their fingers to the keyboard or they pick up a dictaphone, and a-way they go. Usually the lawyer's "work-voice" kicks in and takes over. That work-voice tends to be fairly heavy, formal, traditional, and impersonal. When writing, most lawyers automatically use their work-voice regardless of whether they are:

• writing to a major corporate client to tell it that the jury awarded it $150 million in compensation;
• writing to a retail client in the process of buying a house to say that on some technicality the vendor has avoided the intent of the contract and sold the house to a third party at a much higher price; or
• writing a document for the firm's client to use to communicate with its markets. That document shouldn't be in the voice of the law firm's brand. Rather, it should be in the voice of the client's brand.

Many lawyers are proud of their work-voice. It gives them confidence: makes them feel like a real lawyer. I remember the moment when as a final year law student a friend of mine asked me a question about a legal issue he had read about in the paper. Lo and behold, I knew the answer. Even better, when I explained it to him, even I thought I sounded like a lawyer. The relief—the feeling that, "Hey, maybe I'll be able to do this after all"—was immense.

Many people have a work-voice—not just lawyers.

Most of us are familiar with our work-voice. We notice it especially when it starts coming out in an inappropriate context. For example, you're having a relaxing time at a social event and then someone asks you a question about something related to your area of expertise. All of a sudden, you're being consulted professionally. Your work-voice kicks in without you summoning it. The first thing you notice is your cheeks feel a little funny and the words aren't coming out quite right—you feel a little slurry or odd. The second thing you notice is that the person you're speaking to suddenly has a baffled expression on their face because they have no idea what you're saying. That's your work-voice.

Somewhere along the way to becoming a lawyer (or whatever it is we are), most of us develop a work-voice and use it for nearly everything we write—no matter how inappropriate the work-voice is to the audience and purpose of the document.
I think the reason many of us (lawyers in particular) so habitually use our work-voice is because we want to sound professional. Fair enough too. But if we look up and think about "professional" writing, we don't really see anything. So it's difficult to see how to write professionally. Then I think what happens is we decide that in order to write professionally, we'll write in a way that is "formal" and "traditional"—in the hope that that will equal "professional". But "formal" plus "traditional" doesn't equal "professional". It equals pompous and out of date. We can write a letter that's warm, human, clear, and friendly and still be completely professional.

Having thought about voice, let's think about brand.


8.2 Brand
Today, in these communication saturated times, an organization's reputation is expressed through a clearly defined brand. The brand represents the essence of an organization: everything it stands for, and everything that differentiates it from its competitors. To quote the global management consultants McKinsey & Company:
A name becomes a brand, when consumers associate it with a set of tangible, or intangible, benefits that they obtain from that product or service. To build brand equity, a company needs to do two things: first, distinguish its product from others in the market; second, align what it says about its brand in advertising and marketing with what it actually delivers.

Perhaps the best way to understand the concept of brand is to imagine me offering you a sports car and asking you to choose from 3 leading models each from a different manufacturer. The vehicles are labelled Model A, Model B, and Model C. The trouble is you have to choose your car on the basis of the anonymous manufacturers' vehicle specifications and performance criteria (no photographs of the car either).

I expect you'd have trouble choosing—until I told you that Model A was a Corvette, Model B was an Alfa Romeo, and Model C was a Porsche. With that information alone, most of us would choose one of the cars immediately—who cares about the torque ratios, the widget factor, or the number of what-have-yous in the thingy. (Personally, I'd take the Alfa).

Whatever it is that enables us to decide which car to buy as soon as we know the names of the manufacturers is the brand—the intangible thing that influences our buying decision so much more than the product specifications and performance criteria.

The key point about building and maintaining a brand is alignment. This point was made by McKinsey & Company in the quote above: "… a company needs to … align what it says about its brand in advertising and marketing with what it actually delivers." That's true, otherwise, all that advertising and marketing is undone when the customer's or client's expectation is not met by the reality of the product or service. So alignment and delivery are the key to a successful brand.


One aspect of an organization's activities that needs to be aligned with its marketing and advertising to create a successful brand is the organization's documents. Because the documents an organization produces, or relies on, form the "voice of its brand".

8.3 Voice of the brand
The people who create written communications for an organization are creating the "voice of their organization’s brand"—whether they work for the organization or as one of its advisers.

The voice of the brand is vital to the success of some organizations particularly those that provide intangibles. Their communications may be the only thing of any substance that the customer (or potential customer) has to go on when, for example:

• they are deciding whether to buy in the first place;
• they are deciding whether to continue using the service;
• they are working out how to use the product; or
• they are trying to understand and apply some professional advice they've received.

Consequently, each time someone reads an organization's document they connect with the organization's brand. Too often, that moment of truth is sour: the document is formal, impersonal, and awkward. It fails to live up to the values that are the foundation of the organization's brand.

Organizations spend fortunes on logos, visual identities, and advertising. They do so with the aim of creating or refining their brand in an attempt to woo and retain customers. Yet the very same organizations pay little attention to the voice of the brand. Even though it is the voice of the brand that the audience has to deal with often when the audience is busy at work, or weary at the end of the day, and would rather be doing something else.

An organization needs to treat the voice of its brand as seriously as it treats its visual identity, its customer service, and the flowers in reception.

A simple way for the organization to do that is to measure its documents against its brand values, its brand promise, its mission, its vision etc.


Consider this simple letter from a major global organization. The letter was sent to a former colleague of mine in response to a letter she wrote to the organization seeking information to help with her tertiary studies. (I need to mention that the information my friend asked for was not at all secret or valuable.)

Here's the letter:

Dear Ms X

Thank you for requesting information about [name of the company]. We appreciate your interest in our company and our products.

Due to the sheer volume of student requests for information we receive, we are not able to provide detailed answers to specific questions about our company. However, there is a comprehensive packet of marketing information available to students.

Please note, that as we are a [particular type of company], we are not required to produce a [certain publication] and this information is considered proprietary in nature.

Our student information packet is now available for review on our corporate website, www.[web address] in the section titled "All about [name of company]". All information contained in our student packet is available on this website.

In case you do not have internet access, we have enclosed a copy of our current student packet.

As most of the information published about [name of the company] is available in magazine articles, we strongly recommend that you look through the "Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature", which is an annual index of magazine articles. This should be available to you at a public or university library.

Thanks again for contacting us. Please call us at [number] if we may be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Let's consider a few questions about the letter and the organization. I need to emphasise here, that I'm not concerned about the content of the letter. I completely accept that the organization does not have to answer every set of questions it gets from students. My concerns are only with the style.

So to the questions about the letter:

• How does the letter make you feel about the organization? I find the letter insincere—for example, it seems to give with one hand and take with the other. Then in the last paragraph, the writer invites the reader to ring for more information but that's the last thing the writer wants the reader to do. Also, the letter is defensive, impersonal, and repetitive.
• What sort of organization might the letter be from? Hard to tell really: maybe a financial services organization or a government body.
• Is the organization cool? Not at all.
• Do you want to work there? No. Buy its products? Not really. Invest in the organization? Hmmn, investment is different.

The letter is the voice of the organization's brand and it gives us a fairly clear impression of the organization.

To see who the letter is from, see the footnote where the answer is hidden to preserve the surprise?

How did the letter measure up against your perception of that organization's brand? I use the letter as an example in a plain language training course I run. Most participants on the course say there is a massive disconnect between how they feel about that organization—that is, its brand—and how the letter reveals that organization to be.

Let's consider a legal example. Several years ago I was employed in the Melbourne office of a national law firm but I worked on secondment in-house for a client in Sydney. One Friday afternoon, a partner I knew slightly in my firm's Sydney office rang and asked me to help him out. He had developed a suite of documents for a client and needed to deliver them on Monday. The documents had to be as plain as could be. He'd gone way over budget and still felt the documents weren't clear enough. Effectively, he asked me to give him my Sunday and edit the documents to improve their clarity. I was happy to help.


A few hours later the documents arrived by courier. There was a covering letter addressed to me:

Dear Sir
We refer to our earlier conversation and enclose the documents for your review. We look forward to your comments in due course.
Yours faithfully
[Name of firm—The partner hadn't even signed his name!]

The letter irritated me. A lot. (Mind you I edited the documents anyway.)

I would have been happy with a handwritten note on a with compliments slip. Something like "Dear Christopher, Thanks for this, I owe you lunch. Cheers [name of partner]".

As I see it, the letter from the lawyer was a classic example of someone automatically using their work-voice. In a Zen sense, the writer was not "in the moment" when he dictated the letter. He did not even remotely consider his audience or his purpose.

8.4 The importance of the voice of the brand: to business and in government
For some organizations the voice of the brand doesn't matter—for example, Levis. We don't care too much about the way Levis writes to us—if it ever does other than in advertising and labelling.

But for some organizations, the voice of the brand is of vital importance— for example, a radio station. If we don't like the voice of the brand of a radio station, we're never going to listen to that station. The radio station has got nothing to give us other than its voice.

So if we had a spectrum showing the relative importance of the voice of the brand to an organization, we could put Levi's at one end of the spectrum and a radio station at the other end.

At the same end of the spectrum as the radio station—where the voice of the brand is vital—are organizations like law firms, financial services organizations, many government bodies, providers of medicines, and any organization that gives its staff or its customers a set of instructions or a product manual.


For these organizations, the voice of the brand is fundamentally important. Consider a law firm and its relationship with its clients. The moment of truth comes when the clients read something written by one of the firm's lawyers. In that moment, it doesn't matter how brilliant the writer is as a lawyer, or how pleasant they are to deal with—what matters is how easy it is for the clients to use the documents to make decisions about their businesses and their lives.

That moment of truth matters to the reader because the document matters to the reader. If that wasn't so, they wouldn't be reading the document— and they wouldn't pay the firm to write it.

The moment when the document is read is either a brand damaging, or brand enhancing, moment. The person reading the firm's document quickly sees whether the way in which the firm communicates lives up to the claims the firm makes about itself in its advertising and marketing material. The reader can "smell" whether the firm's advertising and marketing puffery reflect the way the firm provides its services.

To make that point using the McKinsey & Company language (quoted above) , the reader is made abundantly aware of whether the document—a key aspect of the law firm's behaviour and service—is "aligned" with the firm's claims about itself. If the document fails to live up to the brand, then the firm's brand is damaged. However, if the document and the brand are aligned, then the moment when the document is read is a brand enhancing moment: the client is likely to feel happier about using the firm, paying the invoice, coming back next time, and referring other clients to the firm.

Those moments of truth matter for businesses that rely heavily on documents to communicate with their markets.

But the voice of the brand is even more important in a broader context. The fact that so much legislation and judicial writing is inaccessible to all but the members of the legal profession (and even they have to work pretty hard to make sense of some documents) means that the voice of the brand of the State often:

• damages the community's respect for the rule of law and for the legal profession; and
• damages the State's relationship with its citizens.


The problems arise in legislation, in the communications produced by government departments, and in the courts. Consider this point from a tongue-in-cheek article by an Australian journalist covering the vote counting in Florida after the 2000 US election:

It doesn't matter if it's Super League [a reference to a major piece of protracted very public litigation over the running of Rugby League in Australia] or a national election, judges are the most unsatisfactory people to decide life's big questions [By the way, that's going too far even for me!] because it's so hard to work out what they are saying. All of the key decisions in this election, at whatever level, have been followed by universal blank looks. "Has he finished yet? Does that mean we won or lost?"

The point was made more formally by Hon. A M Omar MP, Minister of Justice, Republic of South Africa, in March 1995:

Clear, simple communication is … an absolute and critical necessity for democracy. People have a right to understand the laws that govern them, to understand court proceedings in matters that affect them, to understand what government is doing in their name.

At first glance, it may be a little odd to think about the voice of the brand of a State, of an entire nation. But South Africa has given us a good place to start. The South African Constitution contains a Bill of Rights, which includes the statement that:

This Bill of Rights is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom.

Those are inspiring brand values for any nation: "dignity, equality and freedom".


The challenge is to make the style of legislation live up to these inspiring ideals. One way to do that is to ensure that legislation is inclusive. As Phil Knight, Professor Joseph Kimble, and I said in a 1995 report to the South African Minister of Justice:

Most importantly, plain language allows people to visualize themselves as subjects of the law, and to imagine themselves in the circumstances with which the law deals. This ability to place or imagine oneself within the law is an important distinction between a system of justice and a regime of enforced order.

There is much good news on the legislative front. For example, the main headings in the New South Wales Local Government Act 1993 are:

Chapter 1—Preliminary
Chapter 2—What are the purposes of this Act?
Chapter 3—What is a council's charter?
Chapter 4—How can the community influence what a council does?
Chapter 5—What are a council's function?
Chapter 6—What are the service functions of a council?

The heading for Chapter 4 is my all-time favorite legislative heading "How can the community influence what a council does?" It's so inclusive and welcoming—even if the reader is unfamiliar with the law and legal processes. If they want to find out how to let their local council know what they think, the law welcomes them to the process.

When I quoted that heading to some lawyers working in community legal centers in Namibia, they were ecstatic (I'm not exaggerating) at the thought that legislation could be written like that. New South Wales is not alone in using question headings in legislation: Sweden does too. Other exciting developments in legislative drafting include the increasing use of graphic devices and examples.


How wonderful it would be if more judges also strove to write in a way that enhances respect for the rule of law: not through gravitas, formality, and tradition but through accessibility, clarity, simplicity, and ease of use.

There is good news too in US government departments, many of which are engaged in major long-term projects to improve the clarity of their communications.

If plain language is "beyond a movement", what is it? [Part 7]

Plain language has indeed evolved to become more than a movement. In fact it's now 4 different things:

• one of them somewhat burdensome for business—though great for consumers; and
• the other 3 ripe with opportunities and promise for all.

7.1 The burden
Plain language can be burdensome when seen as something that a regulator requires an organization to comply with—as with the SEC regulations in relation to prospectuses.

The "burdensome stakes" are high in Australia where at least one regulator strongly encourages some organizations to test the clarity of some of their documents—for example, the Corporations Act 2001 requires financial organizations to produce Product Disclosure Statements for each product the organization sells. The law requires those documents to be "… presented in a clear, concise and effective manner." That's not so unusual. But in the explanatory material for the legislation, the regulator, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (which is the Australian equivalent of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission) suggests that organizations test documents on consumers to ensure that the documents are truly clear and that they really meet the legislative requirements.

This encouragement to test is a potentially onerous but, even so, a legitimate requirement. After all, it's easy to say "our documents are in plain language"—it's rather like when someone says "the cheque's in the mail". But no one can really be sure a document is clear unless a sample audience has confirmed that they can use the document to find, to understand, and to use the information they seek.


7.2 The opportunities and promise
Plain language can also be seen in a positive way, for some organizations plain language is:

• a product—eg, my business Words and Beyond provides plain-language document rewriting services, plain-language training courses, and plain-language cultural-change services. There are many other organizations, legal and non-legal, providing similar services— including the Australian law firms I mentioned earlier, Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and Phillips Fox;

• a key part of excellent customer service and client service—eg, for Clarica, for Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and for Phillips Fox;

• a distinguishing feature—eg, for KPMG, for Clarica, for Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and for Phillips Fox.

So for law firms, plain language can be wonderful in 3 ways: as a product, as a value adding part of the experience of buying legal services from the firm, and as a distinguishing feature that clients value.