Writing, Clear and Simple

Yesterday, my wife and I received the following letter from a company that manages some of our investments:

Dear Shareholder:
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is responsible for the oversight of financial services companies acting as broker-dealers to ensure investment recommendations are suitable. Any company that has registered representatives working as financial advisors soliciting investment and insurance products based on the financial status and investment objectives of its clients is classified as a broker-dealer. [Company Name], Inc. is considered a broker-dealer acting n this capacity and is therefore required to confirm certain information to you at least every three years or when information listed on the attached form changes.

The enclosed Confidential Data form contains information specific to you. Please be assured this information is kept in strict confidence and used only for the required maintenance of our records. If any information is incomplete or inaccurate, please add or update the information and return it in the enclosed envelope.

Note: No action is required on your part if the information is correct.

Please direct any inquiries and/or concerns to X-XXX-XXX-XXXX or write to the address below:

[Company Name and Address]

Sincerely,
Client Services Division

OK, Gentle Reader, take out a clean sheet of paper and a Number 2 pencil. What do you think is the biggest problem with this letter? Share your answer in the Comments. 

UPDATE 19 September 2007: Ray Ward, of the (New) Legal Writer blog, nails it:

You have to do an awful lot of reading before you find out why they’re writing you. The first mention of “you,” and what this letter has to do with “you,” doesn’t come until the 75th word. If I got this letter, I might have stopped reading before I found out what its point was.

Exactly. I’m guessing that the response rate for this letter is close to zero. Most people are going to read the first line or two, and then say to themselves “This is just some more of the legal mumbo-jumbo that these people send out all the time. I don’t have time to decypher this.”

Remember the inverted pyramid? Use it. It’s vital in business communication like this letter to let the reader know immediately why they’re getting a letter. In this case, something like this:

Please check the information on the enclosed Confidential Data form. If any of it is wrong, missing, or out of date, note the corrections or additions on the form and return it in the enclosed envelope. If it is all correct, you don’t have to do anything.

From there, the letter can go on to explain  that the information is kept confidential, and that the SEC requires them to verify this type of information periodically.

Put the main point at the beginning. This really isn’t hard to do, which makes me wonder why so few companies do it. 

I’ve written before about using metaphors to help make abstract concepts easier for readers to grasp.

However, you have to be careful not to overload your writing with metaphors, as The Wall Street Journal’s online editorial page illustrates with a Metaphor Alert in today’s Best of the Web:

“The bears would have us believe the sub-prime credit virus heralds the end of the world. They are wrong. The stock market—which I still believe is the best barometer of the health of business and the economic future—has behaved surprisingly well during this difficult stretch of turbulence.. Yes, profits are getting sloppy. And yes, there are some credit shocks out there yet to be revealed.. The animal spirits may have had their wings clipped a bit by the credit crunch, but there is still plenty of sizzle and juice in that story. It’s very easy to be totally pessimistic and bearish right now. That is precisely why I will avoid falling into that trap.”

—Larry Kudlow, National Review Online, Sept. 14

Fifteen metaphors in 123 words. That’s overdoing it, I think.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

—Albert Einstein

My middle daughter is on the school swim team, and one of the many handouts we get is a “Student & Parent Handbook.” And every year that I look at this handbook, I take out my pen and start editing it. I just can’t help myself.

For example, the first sentence on the first page:

The purpose of this handbook is to provide the public with insights into the Fargo Public School athletic and non-athletic programs.

 There’s a lot going on here, but the first things that caught my eye were The purpose of this handbook is to provide and the public.

Almost every time you see the phrase the purpose of, you can strike it out. When you’re explaining what the purpose of something is, just say what the purpose is. You don’t need the excess baggage of the purpose of this. Delete it.

And the public is the audience of the handbook. If you feel that you have to address the audience directly, use you. In this case, I don’t think even you is necessary; I’m opting to replace provide the public with insights into with describes. (In this context, I think provides insights is overblown.)

What else can we do? Let’s try to be specific about the information in the handbook, which is policies, guidelines, and procedures. And I think athletic and non-athletic programs just about covers all of them, so why not simplify that as well?

That gives us this:

This handbook describes the policies, guidelines, and procedures we follow in Fargo Public School activity programs.

 And that takes care of the first sentence. Only 27 pages to go.

What do you think? Did I improve things? What changes would you have made? 

Lee LeFever of Common Craft has an interesting blog post about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and has borrowed some ideas from the systems dynamics field to evaluate them.

I can’t help but think about the whole idea of stocks and flows, borrowed from the field of systems dynamics. I wrote a series a while back about it - but the basic idea that online communication has two states - active and static. For instance, when a blog post is posted, it’s active - it flows through the blogosphere, through rss readers, etc.  After a while, it becomes archived and static - stocked for future reference. Online content flows and then becomes stocked.

What kind of content are you writing? Mostly active—flows—or static—stocks?

A quick and easy little quiz for you: What’s wrong with this sentence?

A thing of which I am afraid of is the maintenance effort.

Put your answer in the comments. 

(Note: I don’t much care if you don’t know the correct  grammatical or usage terms. Just describe the problem as best you can. Pointing and grunting would work.)