Guaranteed benefits of clear writing to organizations

Everyone knows customer letters, brochures, emails and management reports should be clear and concise. The results are massive savings in administration, improved productivity, better employee and customer relations and potentially more sales and business. The list of benefits is endless. But changing the communications culture in any large organization has proved most difficult, often impossible. Now organizations such as the City of Los Angeles, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Halifax Bank of Scotland and the law firm Denton Wilde Sapte are using our Writing Course, StyleWriter and our House Style service. They choose this solution because it guarantees results.

Running StyleWriter through business and government document consistently shows 90 percent are poorly written. Surveys of business documents redrafted into a readable style show that readers – customers, colleagues and especially the public – always want a clear message rather than business-speak or bureaucratese.

 

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Why can't organizations write well?

Here’s a few of the reasons organizations fail to communicate clearly:

• The culture of business and government encourages poor writing. Most people’s writing style comes from the documents they see around them. So unless you train everyone in effective writing, improving writing standards is difficult.

• Organizations put employees on a business writing course. A one-day training course will not transform the way employees think and write. People going on traditional business writing courses often showed little improvement in writing style. Statistics on writing style – measured by StyleWriter – show there is typically only a 10 percent improvement one week after the course but a month later most participants fell back to their old writing habits because there’s no backup to the training.

• Most people think they do write clearly. However, at least 80 percent of documents in organizations are badly written and full of poor style faults. It always comes as a shock when people see how much clearer documents can become with strong editing.

• Managers often believe the problem is never with their writing style, but with the style of their staff. Managers happily send their staff to writing courses. But after the course, the managers continue to redraft the new, clearer style back into management-speak. The unspoken message to the person trying to write clearly is: “Don’t write clearly, write as I do.”

• Most writers are so close to their jargon and style they cannot see their writing faults. They have no idea why others find their documents difficult to read and understand.

• Many people believe the long-winded, complex style of business and government is the expected and agreed style. Many employees look at existing documents and copy the style. This means people who normally speak clearly and write well, quickly pick up the stilted style of their colleagues.

• Many people learned to write at university and college where length and an impressive vocabulary seemed to be a virtue. Yet in the workplace, everyone wants short, clear documents to communicate quickly and efficiently.
  

• Only one person in 50 attends training in effective writing. Organizing and running courses is time-consuming and expensive. If you use outside consultants to run them, they can cost up to $1,500 for ten people.

To guarantee everyone in an organization writes clearly, you need to change the culture, train staff and give them the tools to back up the training. This has proved impossible without good writing software. In the same way running a spelling checker on your word processor guarantees everyone writes without typing and spelling mistakes, our Electronic Writing Course and StyleWriter editing software can guarantee the benefits of clear writing.

 

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Savings to business and government

National governments, councils, multinational corporations and major industry bodies have adopted the plain English model for sound, commercial reasons — plain English saves time and money. The savings claimed for plain English are remarkable:

• The US Navy estimated plain English could save it between $250–$300 million every year.

• General Electric saved $275,000 by redrafting manuals into plain English.

• The US Department of Veterans Affairs saved $40,000 redrafting one standard letter into plain English.

• British Telecom cut customer queries by 25 percent by using plain English.

• The Royal Mail saved £500,000 in nine months by redesigning one form in plain English.

• UK businesses lose £6 billion a year because of badly written letters.

• A UK Government Plain English initiative saved £9 million in printing costs.
  Source: Joe Kimble Writing for Dollars

These savings usually come from organizations training key staff and employing professional writers and editors. But these people can only edit a few of the thousands of documents produced every day in large organizations. Imagine the savings if you used training and editing software to guarantee everyone used StyleWriter on every document.

 

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How much would your organization save by using StyleWriter?

Unfortunately, the costs of poor communication do not appear in the balance sheet. If they did, you would do something to control them. In the following examples, the biggest cost is staff time (author’s time plus the reader’s time), multiplied by the number of employees who receive the document.

• A government department sent a two-page memo to 15,000 employees that took an average of 10 minutes to read and process. The real cost to the department was $100,000 in salaries, overheads and associated costs. The memo was about keeping staff kitchens clean. Was this really a $100,000 problem?
• A bank had a sales letter rewritten by a professional, plain English editor. The clearer, redraft brought in an extra $11 million of new business. No conventional accounting method would record the previous $11 million missed business opportunity.
• One council sent 1.3 million pages of committee reports to members in one year. If members worked a sixteen-hour day, seven-day week, reading a page every minute, they would eventually get through all the documents after 3.7 years.

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Try this simple calculation

Work out the number of sheets of paper, emails and faxes in your organization produces in one working day. Estimate the cost of each of these documents at $10 a page.

Now calculate by the number of people who have to read them and add $1 for each person reading each document. (To give you an idea of this figure, a typical office worker receives over 100 emails a day). That will give you rough idea of the cost of your paperwork for each day. Then multiply the figure by 240 to find out a realistic cost of paperwork in your organization every year.
StyleWriter will cut this bill by 30 percent.

Contact Editor Software for your corporate solution

To discuss how our Writing Course, StyleWriter and our House Style service can improve the way your organization communicates, contact us. We’ll be happy offer you the help, advice and solutions you need.

 

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"I work as a senior marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company. StyleWriter showed us we're not very good - no we're dreadful - at communicating with our customers. Since using StyleWriter, I've gained the skill of writing clearly. It's like shining a searchlight through a sea of corporate fog." - Marketing Executive

 

"Looking back at the way I used to write press releases I now understand why editors didn't bother to publish them. StyleWriter shows me how to write in the style newspaper and magazine editors prefer. The result is more free exposure in the media." - Chief Executive Officer

 

"I am trying to get my University to consider buying a site license for the programs you offer. Without qualification I could not recommend StyleWriter and the writing guides more highly and the excellent, good-natured technical support."
- University Lecturer

 

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" StyleWriter is fantastic. It's almost an unfair advantage! It makes me look smarter than I really am." - StyleWriter user

 

"I am trying to get my University to consider buying a site license for the programs you offer. Without qualification I could not recommend StyleWriter and the writing guides more highly." - University Lecturer

 

"Your software has been a godsend to me and my staff. We are not professional writers but we write copy for brochures, ads and sales letters. We have seen our writing skills increase after installing and using StyleWriter." - Director of Marketing and Sales

 

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