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The principle

You send out a report. Nobody objects. No one emails to say it was unclear, or hard to follow, or wrong. You conclude it was fine.

It was not necessarily fine. Nobody complained, which is a different thing. Silence tells you no one raised an objection. It does not tell you anybody read the report, understood it, or acted on it.

The absence of complaint is the weakest signal there is, so don’t regard it as praise.

Why it fails in practice

Readers do not complain about unclear writing, for a plain reason: complaining costs them something and gains them nothing. To say a paper is confusing is to risk sounding as though they were not smart enough to understand it. Easier to skim, form a rough impression, note it and move on. The worse the writing, the more likely that is what happens, and the quieter your inbox.

The feedback runs backwards. Clear writing provokes questions, challenges and decisions. Unclear writing provokes nothing. You read the silence as success when it is closer to the opposite: the sound of a room that has stopped paying attention.

There is a less comfortable reason we accept it. Silence protects the author. If no one raised a problem, the writing must have been fine, and any failure to act was the reader's fault, not the writer's. We are quick to accept silence as approval because the alternative points back at us.

An example

A monthly board pack carried the same sentence in its treasury section from March: on current forecasts, the cash headroom would be exhausted by October. The board noted the pack in March, in April, and every month after. The forecast did not improve. In September the finance director went to the bank for an emergency extension to the facility and got worse terms than the same request would have earned in March.

Nobody had buried the warning or ignored it. It had been put in front of the board six times and noted six times. But a board notes the papers it has not acted on, and the writer read six months of ‘noted’ as six months of the board being on top of the problem. The board was on top of nothing. The sentence sat in a section the non-executives skimmed, written as a forecast rather than a request, so month after month there was nothing to act on, and nobody did.

What to do instead

Stop waiting for the signal because it is not coming. And if did come it would arrive too late to be any use.

Assume instead that any report which drew no response failed to land and test it against this style guide. Would a reader who stopped after the first paragraph know what you wanted? Does the recommendation ask for a decision, or invite the reader to ‘note’ something? Could someone act on it without asking you a single question?

Then ask a colleague for their view. But you need to ask the right question. ‘Was that clear?’ invites a polite yes, and is no more informative than the silence you started with. Few people will tell you to your face that your writing was hard work.

Asking for advice works better than asking for feedback, because advice is about the next version, not a verdict on the last one. So, instead of asking what they thought of your document, ask what they would change. For example: ‘If you were sending this to the chief executive, what would you cut?’

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