An expiration date for boilerplate documents?
If you use boilerplate text or documents in your work, here’s something to consider: Put an expiration date on your boilerplate.
Boilerplate refers to blocks of text that are used repeatedly in documents. For example, lawyers frequently (constantly) use the same basic sentences and paragraphs in the documents they create. In many cases, they have entire documents that are boilerplate. Or they take a similar document, or last year’s version, and copy it. Then they make the changes required by the situation, and voila! A new document. Sort of.
Boilerplate is a great time-saver, and it helps ensure that you include all of the elements that you need in a document. For example, you could create a boilerplate letter that you use when you respond to customer inquiries. It can include a placeholder that you replace with a response to their question, along with standard components like a sentence thanking them for contacting your company, and the contact information you want them to use if they have more questions.
There’s a problem with boilerplate, though. All to often, it just gets passed along from year to year, and nobody asks whether it’s written well, whether it conveys the message well, or even whether it conveys the right message to begin with.
For example, in comments of the “In class exercise” post from a couple of weeks ago, Tom pointed out that the writer of the letter may simply have pasted text from the pertinent government regulations into the letter. In other words, he or she used boilerplate. And this was probably the same letter they used last year, and the year before that, et cetera. When it came time to send out this year’s letter, nobody stopped to ask “Does this letter get the results we want?”
Go ahead and use boilerplate. Take the time to write it well, and it will serve you well. But put an expiration date on all of your boilerplate. When it reaches that date, stop using it. Take a long hard look at it and ask yourself if it needs cleaning up or revising. And maybe you’ll decide that you should toss it in the dustbin and start fresh.
Your readers will thank you.
Roy Jacobsen
Post a Comment
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments