LANSING – What is the great hidden cost of doing business and carrying on the government? Poor communication. And the numbers are staggering. Anyone who needs proof can find it in the just published second edition of ”Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law,” by Joseph Kimble, a distinguished professor emeritus at Cooley Law School. He has been collecting data for decades.
One chapter summarizes 60 empirical studies showing the benefits of using plain language for both sides—agencies and companies on the one hand, and consumers on the other. Here are just a handful of examples:
• The Veterans Benefits Administration revised a single letter and tested it at a regional office. From one year to the next, phone calls dropped from about 1,110 to about 200. That’s one letter alone at a single agency.
• In the State of Washington, the Department of Revenue rewrote a letter that tripled the number of businesses paying a commonly ignored use tax.
• After simplifying a billing statement, the Cleveland Clinic recovered an additional $1 million a month in the months following, thanks to an 80 percent increase in patient payments.
• Researchers gave persons taking out payday loans two different envelopes containing their loan: for one group, the envelope was blank; for the other group, the envelope had graphics that either compared the cost of the loan over months with credit-card fees or illustrated how long, on average, people take to repay the loan. The envelopes with graphics decreased borrowing by 17 percent. When applied to the total amount that Americans borrowed in that year, this represents an $8.5 billion decrease.
• In Canada, the Digital Transformation Office worked with different agencies to improve website design and content. In prototype testing, the user success jumped from 40 to 85 percent in one instance, from 23 to 68 percent in another, and from 23 to 72 percent in another.
The studies were done in countries around the world. Besides Canada, that includes the U.K., Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, South Africa, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand.
The main goal of plain language is to make online and written information clear and accessible to the greatest possible number of its users. This takes great skill and draws on dozens of principles and techniques, ranging over organization, design (or layout), sentences, words, and testing documents on ordinary readers whenever possible. One chapter of the book lists the elements of plain language. Another one addresses the ten biggest myths about plain language (for instance, it reduces writing to baby talk, it’s subverted by the need to use technical terms, it’s not accurate or precise).
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