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# Unclear writing is expensive
- URL: https://www.plainfinance.net/unclear-writing-is-expensive/
- Published: 2026-09-01T14:25:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-01T14:25:34.000Z
- Author: Gary Bandy

The cost of unclear writing 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. The reader pays next, in the time spent decoding it, in the queries sent back to the author, and in the poor decisions they make when they give up and act on a guess.

The organisation's customers and suppliers pay, too: an invoice that cannot be understood is paid late, or wrong; a specification that is misread produces the wrong delivery. Each is an outcome the writing produced, and a worse one than the writer meant.

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*](https://cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781531024543/Writing-for-Dollars-Writing-to-Please-Second-Edition?ref=plainfinance.net) summarises about 50 studies of what plain language does for the organisations that adopt it. The [US Veterans Benefits Administration](https://department.va.gov/plain-language/?ref=plainfinance.net) 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 and that is 150 hours a year gone on one letter. Multiply it by every letter and form the agency sends, and the true cost runs into many thousands of hours, before you count the frustration of the people who could not follow the letter, or the trust they lost in the body that wrote to them.

The board reports and business cases you write are not benefits letters, but the mechanism is the same. Unclear writing does not stay on the page; it turns into things that happen.

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.