Lost in translation

It’s amazing how many good ideas are lost in translation – not from one language to another, but from the brain to the printed page. One reason could be that it’s so tempting, when you suddenly find that you’re unable to get your idea down on paper effectively, to throw more words at the problem. Yet the solution is often to do quite the opposite, and keep it simple.

Take a recent Department of Health guidance document, which should have been issued with its own health warning:

‘The aim of this resource pack is to help organisations promote and implement the use of an HR Leadership Qualities Framework that describes those behaviours which enhance NHS HR capacity and capability to improve the patient experience.’

Why complicate matters? Try using:

‘This pack will help you promote and introduce an HR leadership qualities framework. In turn, this will help improve the service we give patients.’

Then there’s this example from a recent invitation to tender (specifics changed to protect the guilty):

‘Description/objective of the contract: To provide evidence on the extent to which north west organisation’s needs for enhanced and modified skills and knowledge among their existing adult employees are being met.’

This description is not unusually bad. It may even make perfect sense to you. But it’s extremely unlikely that the author would have described their objective like this if you’d asked them to explain it over a cup of coffee. Instead, they might have said something like:

‘We want to discover how far employees of companies in the north west have improved their skills and knowledge.’

Yet something stopped them using clear, simple language when they started writing. They forgot that their reader is no more likely to enjoy reading dense, turgid documents than they are. It’s as if people feel they have to impress others with their language and use of corporate jargon. They ignore the fact that professional people today simply do not have time to decipher poor documents.

So you need to be efficient to make sure your message doesn’t get lost in a mountain of other documents, letters and emails. Inefficient writing wastes millions of pounds every year and documents are often four or five times longer than they need to be. These documents take much longer to read than they should have to – that is, if people read them at all. As a result, your good ideas might go to waste.

Here are three tips to help you with your writing:

1. Clarify your key message before you begin, by writing a short three-sentence statement to sum up the issues you want to cover.
2. Plan your document too before you write it. Never use the writing process to work out what you think. You might be clearer when you reach the end of the document, but your reader is more likely to be confused. Instead, separate the thinking process from the writing, and do the thinking first.
3. Don’t be afraid to use short, punchy words, and to be less verbose. It doesn’t mean that you are dumbing down. It’s fine to use jargon as long as you’re certain that your reader will understand it. But you can still use plain language between the jargon. Flowery language just makes for heavy reading. Why say, ‘We’re currently involved in the implementation’ of something, when you can just say ‘We’re implementing’ it?