When you choose plain-language trainers, or someone to rewrite your documents, we encourage you to think beyond the “words” — to think about your organisation and your people.
Your people
Like you, we are trying to do something that can be difficult, namely to get people ― often highly intelligent and well-educated people ― to change how they express themselves in writing. This is a deeply personal thing to change.
Your organisation
At work, many people write in a way that is heavy, formal, and traditional. Rarely, does their writing reflect their organisation’s brand. Yet they often seem to resist their organisation’s push for clearer documents.
Even though no organisation wants its documents to be off-putting, complicated and unreadable, the reality is that many business and government documents are at least that bad — and many are worse.
Also, even though business writing training has been around for a long time, truly clear documents are unusual. But documents that don’t make sense are common.
The cause of the problem
We believe that many writers have a subconscious fear that changing to a clearer style of writing will cause their writing to seem less professional. Curiously, that fear exists even though readers prefer clear writing and admire clear writers.
The start of the solution
Helping people to overcome their fears about changing their writing is the start to making documents as clear as they can be. This is what we do best. And, we believe we are as good as anyone at doing it.