Count the cost of unclear writing
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The principle
Unclear writing is expensive. The cost is real and it is large, but it never appears on an invoice and nobody is asked to account for it.
The writer pays first, in the hours spent drafting and redrafting a document that does not land. Those are hundreds or thousands of words that no one will read.
The reader pays next, in the time spent decoding the document, in the queries sent back to the author, and in the poor decisions they make when they give up on it and act on a guess.
And the world outside the organisation pays, too. A customer who cannot understand an invoice pays it late, or wrong, or not at all. A supplier who misreads a specification delivers the wrong thing. A member of the public who cannot follow a form fills it in incorrectly, or misses what they were entitled to, or gives up. Each of those is an outcome the writing produced, and a worse one than the writer meant.
An example
The costs are usually invisible, but occasionally someone measures them.
Joseph Kimble, an American law professor, spent decades collecting the evidence. His book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please summarises around 60 studies of what plain language does for the organisations that adopt it. The US Veterans Benefits Administration rewrote a single form letter and tracked the calls to one regional office: over a year, they fell from about 1,100 to about 200. That is 900 calls no one had to make or answer, from improving one letter at one office.
Read the number the other way round and it tells you what the original letter had been costing all along. Every one of those 900 calls was a person who could not understand what the agency wanted, and a member of staff who had to stop and explain. Put each call at 10 minutes, modest for a confused query about a benefit, and that is 150 hours a year gone on one letter. Cost that staff time at the minimum wage, add the employer's National Insurance and pension on top, and count nothing for the caller's own time, and you are into a 4-figure sum. Multiply it by every letter and form the agency sends, and the true cost runs into many thousands of hours.
The damage runs beyond time, of course. When another benefits office tested a rewritten letter, the share of people who replied rose from under a third to nearly half, and every reply was complete, where before almost a fifth had come back missing information the office needed. The clearer letter did not just save calls; it changed what people did, and more of them did it right.
Kimble is careful to add the costs no one can put a figure on: the frustration and anger of people who cannot tell what is being asked of them, the trust they lose in the body that wrote to them, and, where the document carries medical or safety instructions, the harm that follows when they are not understood.
The pattern is not confined to America. When the UK’s customs department rewrote one of its forms in plain language, the proportion of forms filled in wrongly fell from 55% to 3%. Every one of those errors had been someone's time to spot, someone's time to correct, and a delay to whatever the form was meant to set in motion. The rewrite cost a few thousand pounds once; the errors had been costing far more, every year, unremarked.
The board reports and business cases you write are not benefits letters or customs forms, but the mechanism is the same, and it reaches your directors and managers, customers and suppliers as surely as the agency's letters reached veterans. An invoice a customer misunderstands is paid late, and late payment is a cost to your cash flow. A contract term a supplier misreads is a wrong delivery, and putting it right costs money. Unclear writing does not stay on the page; it turns into things that happen.
What to do instead
Start counting, in your own work, the costs you have not been noticing.
- The next time a paper of yours generates a run of clarifying emails, count them, and count the minutes each cost you to answer.
- The next time a decision you asked for is deferred, ask whether the reader failed to grasp what you were asking.
- The next time you spend an afternoon on a third draft, ask whether the first would have worked had you settled the reader and the answer before you began.
Once you can see the cost, writing clearly stops looking like extra effort spent on top of the work. It is the cheaper option. It was always the cheaper option; the price of the alternative was simply going unrecorded.