Law professor argues that legalese is bad for business

Law professor Joseph Kimble believes that legalese costs business and government a fortune, that “bequeaths” says nothing that “gives” does not, that simple language is more precise than legal language and that plain language “beats legalese in every way with readers.”

His treatise on the topic, “Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please,” is a must for every communicator’s library. It’s also the perfect — free — gift for the lawyer in your life.

‘Clinging to legalese’

Kimble writes:

“If readers understand plain language better, then no doubt they’ll like it better than the dense, impersonal prose of most public documents. And because they understand it better, they’ll make fewer mistakes in dealing with it, have fewer questions, and ultimately save time and money — for themselves and for the writer’s company or agency. …

“[C]orporate lawyers and government lawyers need to know what kinds of tangible and intangible harm their organizations may suffer by clinging to legalese.

“But the trouble runs so deep — after centuries of poor models, bad habits, professionalitis, inadequate training, and general neglect — that it will take a universal commitment to fix it. It will take a cultural change, one that enshrines clarity and simplicity. … Start now.”

Amen.

Making a case

“Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please” is also packed with case studies showing that simple language saves money and time and drives people to act more effectively than convoluted prose. That makes it a great tool for selling plain English in your organization.

Improve approvals

Want to develop an approval process that doesn’t drive you nuts?

• Read more: Check out — and share — Joseph Kimble’s “Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please.”
• Boost your own abilities: Find out about Ann’s next Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s manual, Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive Your Nuts.
• Join the club: Get dozens of tipsheets on improving approvals at RevUpReadership.com.

I remember the good old days at Hallmark Cards, when I was responsible for the company’s gorgeous, glossy employee magazine.

Period.

Yup, I wrote and managed one quarterly publication.

Occasionally I’d pitch in to help a colleague who produced the daily employee newsletter. I’d write a book chapter or brochure now and again. I believe I remember making a horrible video once.

But the gist of my job was to produce four magazines a year. That came out to about 20 publications over the course of my five-year career at Hallmark.

I know folks now who produce that many pieces a week.

Overwhelmed by assignments

And that’s one of the problems with communication today. (Oh, my A-Rod, did I just type that? What am I, 90?)

But it’s true: One of the problems with communication today is that communicators have far, far too much work to do to do anything well. That leaves us with two options:

• Resign ourselves to lives of mediocrity. Oh, we’ll get everything done, all right. But none of it will be very good. And that will make us very, very sad. (Not to mention exhausted and cranky.)
• Perform communication triage.

(Here’s a tip: Choose No. 2.)

Communication triage is actually pretty easy to perform. Conveniently, it takes three steps:

• Prioritize. Sort projects into A, B and C pieces — or essential, nice to have and frankly, doesn’t deliver much value.
• Allocate resources. Invest in A projects, develop templates and other tools to streamline B projects and let C projects die (or kill them).
• Sell your plan. Planning and metrics are excellent alternatives to your third option, which is doing daily battle over priorities and resources.

Improve approvals

Want to master the art of managing the approval process?

• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Work with Ann to polish your writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching sessions.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on managing the approval process at RevUpReadership.com.
• Find Ann’s out about Ann’s next “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” teleseminar.
• Read Ann’s “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” handbook.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

“The bad news is, communicators don’t win the approval process war comma by comma,” says Ann Wylie Wylie, president of Wylie Communications Inc. and author of “How to Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” (http://bit.ly/76J2zd). “If you’re begging for authority, article by article, to choose whether ‘that’ or ‘which’ is the right word to use in the fourth paragraph, you’ve already lost.”

A new teleseminar aims to help communicators gain control of the approval process.

Program details

What: “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” teleseminar (http://bit.ly/7tccOL)

Why: To help communicators gain more authority in the organization and get their copy through reviews faster

Who: Presented by Ann Wylie (http://bit.ly/60rAFt); sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America (http://www.prsa.org/)

When: 3 p.m. Eastern time (2 p.m. Central, 1 p.m. Mountain, 12 p.m. Pacific) on Feb. 11

Where: Register online (http://bit.ly/7tccOL)

In this program, Wylie will share tips to help communicators:

• Reduce the number of reviewers
• Create guidelines to support the approval process
• Use simple scripts and approaches for communicating with approvers
• Deal with difficult approvers and improve efficiency
• Use quick tricks for making the process easier and better

Quotes:

From the trainer:

“When I worked at one company, I once had to have 100 people review and approve an article I’d written for our employee annual report. Needless to say, it took much longer for me to run the approval process on that story than to research, write and edit the piece in the first place.” — Ann Wylie, president of Wylie Communications Inc., who will present the seminar

From the PRSA professional development director:

“Ann’s insights are especially valuable because she has worked on all sides of the communication ‘desk’ — as a corporate communicator, in a PR agency, as a magazine editor and as a consultant. Her workshops are always extremely well received by our members and other writers.” — Judy Voss, PRSA’s director of professional development

From teleseminar attendees:

“[Ann's teleseminar] provided simple solutions to a realistic issue that I have to confront on the job every day. I believe the tips and tactics given will help ease what can often be a frustrating and time-consuming process.” —Bonnie Mae Serino,
communication project manager,
WorldatWork

“[The teleseminar provided] extremely helpful for working efficiently with upper management to speed up the review process and identify useful tactics to retain ownership of copy throughout the process.” —  Diane Renzulli,
vice president for Communications,
Philadelphia Health Management Corporation

“The worry lines were immediately reduced on my staff’s foreheads. They were so tired of having copy bounced back and forth at the staff level before it was sent up the chain.” — J. Lindsey Wolf, APR, PRSA Fellow,
manager, Communications Division,
Environmental Services Department

More information about approvals

• Ann’s resources about approvals
• Information about Ann’s handbook on the approval process

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc. (http://www.wyliecomm.com/), a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Her workshops take her from Hollywood to Helsinki, helping communicators at NASA, FedEx, Motorola, H&R Block and other organizations improve their skills. She’s the author of a dozen learning tools, including  RevUpReadership.com (http://bit.ly/KJ2t3), a toolbox for writers; and Wylie’s Writing Tips (http://bit.ly/6JgZLJ), a free e-zine. Her work has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills.

About PRSA:

The Public Relations Society of America (http://www.prsa.org/), headquartered in New York City, is the world’s largest professional organization for public relations practitioners. The society’s members represent business and industry, counseling firms, government, associations, hospitals, schools, professional services firms and nonprofit organizations. Chartered in 1948, PRSA has 116 chapters throughout the United States and extends services and professional development to the student level through the Public Relations Student Society (PRSSA) with 209 chapters on college campuses throughout the country.

For more information, contact:

Ann Wylie
Wylie Communications Inc.
816/997-8753
Ann@WylieComm.com

by Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc.

a

“Sign on a newspaper reporter’s desk: ‘The strongest desire is neither love nor hate. It is one person’s need to change another person’s copy.’”

— Gilbert Cranberg,
Columbia Journalism Review

When I worked at one company, I once had to have — no lie — 100 people review and approve an article I’d written for our employee annual report. (Lest you wonder, this was not the story where we revealed that the company was producing nuclear arms for sale to Iraq.) Needless to say, it took much longer for me to run the approval process on that story than to research, write and edit the piece in the first place.

I’m not alone.

My training business takes me across the United States, Canada and Europe, working in-house with corporate communicators who want to improve their copy, reach more readers with their press releases or make their websites clearer and more engaging. Wherever I go — from Boston to Brussels, Portland to Paris, Hollywood to Helsinki — communicators tell me the same thing:

The approval process drives them nuts.

No doubt about it, the worst part of the communication business is, in the words of Ragan Communications editor David Murray, “the grinding, gut-wrenching, soul-sapping approval process required to get a company to say anything at all.”

A flawed approval process can cost an organization time, talent, credibility, quality and money. I once worked with an organization that consistently took more than a year to approve a single product brochure. The result: months and months of lost or reduced sales.

Still, I wouldn’t want to live without an approval process. (I, for one, never want to spend a day giving a deposition because of something I wrote in a press release.)

So the goal isn’t to do away with the approval process. The goal is to come up with an approval process that does the job without driving you nuts. The long-term way to do that is to take back the approval process. That’s an approach that takes more than a single article to describe.

But, short term, here are four steps you can implement tomorrow for developing a process that works:

1. Rename it.

Why do we call it an approval process? “Approval process” suggests that we’re asking for approval — for permission, consent, authorization, say-so.

And we’re not. We’re asking for help.

So instead of asking your content experts to approve the copy, ask them for help. Ask them to review the story, to check for errors, to assure there are no inaccuracies.

Call it a review, a fact check or a technical verification.

That will change expectations and reduce the chances that Bob in accounting will use your copy to play out his fantasy that he’s red-pen-wielding Mrs. Robb, his third-grade English teacher, grading your paper.

2. Stop emailing Word docs.

In the short run, sending out digital copy makes your life easier. Punch “send,” and you’ve distributed the story to all the reviewers.

But in the long run, sending out digital copy makes your life harder. That’s because digital copy invites wholesale rewriting. (After all, armed with a screen full of text and the Highlight Changes tool, you’d hack away at the copy, too, wouldn’t you?)

Instead of emailing Word documents, try faxing, distributing via interoffice mail or emailing PDFs. This makes indiscriminate revising difficult for the reviewer.

You want your content experts to mark up your copy with a pen, on paper, not slash it to pieces on screen.

3. Push back.

Yesterday afternoon, I was coaching a writer whose lawyers had scraped all the demographic information out of a “Who’s our customer?” story. The resulting piece announced that their average customer was a . . . human . . . of some age or other, with or without income, who lived somewhere.

Me: “Why did they take the details out?”

She: “They don’t want it to fall into the hands of competitors.”

I pointed out that competitive secrets are really a marketing issue, not a legal one. The folks in marketing felt comfortable releasing the information; they had already approved the story. Given that, why were the lawyers concerned?
Now, there might have been a privacy issue or some other real legal problem with releasing those numbers. The point is, we should understand the legal — or other — counsel we’re given. If the lawyers think they’re protecting us from ourselves in issues outside their area of expertise, we need to know so we can decide what to do with their advice.

4. Make a difference.

Finally, here’s the best way to make sure you never have to grovel over commas again: Produce communications that make a difference.

If the powers-that-be see you as nothing more than a comma jockey, they won’t think twice before making changes. But once you start documenting the bottom-line benefits your communications are delivering to your organization it’s amazing how your executives and colleagues will stop worrying about whether you’re running the headlines in bold face or italics.
Become a real player, and the review process becomes a whole new game.

Improve approvals

Want to master the art of managing the approval process?

• Read Ann’s “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” handbook.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on managing the approval process at RevUpReadership.com.
• Find Ann’s out about Ann’s next “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” teleseminar.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2005 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

by Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc.

a

When my sister, Lynn Wylie, met Richard Dreyfus on a cruise recently, she asked the actor-turned-Constitutional scholar what it was like to work with a mechanical shark.

Almost every day, Dreyfus said, he’d arrive on the set of “Jaws” to hear this message over the intercom:

“The shark is down.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the shark is not working today.”

Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to show up day-in, day-out, ready to do the job you were hired to do, but not be able to get your work done because some system is broken?

Friends, I’ve got news for you. If you work in most organizations:

“The approval process is down.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the approval process is not working today.”

Here are three ways to get a functional approval process up and running in your organization:

1. ‘Step away from the editing transformer, sir.’

Chris Smith is one of my favorite thinkers about writing and communication. I always learn something from Three Things, the hilarious and helpful editing e-zine he writes for his colleagues at the energy company Entergy.

Here’s the senior lead communications specialist’s advice about handling approvals:

“Among your 14,000 co-workers, many know more than I do about engineering, accounting, transformers, law and other things. But only a handful know as much as you about writing headlines, finding the lead/lede in a story, correcting misplaced acronyms or wrongly capitalized uses of commission, company or other common nouns.

“I say let ‘em mangle their own drafts, thank them for the ideas, then edit … before you post a story or release. In return I promise to limit my electrical work to fixing lamp cords at home. Just say, ‘Step away from the editing transformer, sir, it’s a high-voltage process.’”

It’s another way to say, “Let’s respect each other’s expertise,” and I like it.

2. Redefine the client.

The customer is always right, right?

So the division, department or vice president who “hired” you to create their brochure or newsletter should have final say, right?

Wrong.

You and that brochure customer of yours are both working for the same client. And that client, for every communication you create, is the organization, not any one person or department.

As a communicator, you have a responsibility to your real client — the organization — for the messages and communications you create. That means the communicators — and not the bean-counters, lawyers or division heads — must have the responsibility and the authority for communications.

To get out of that “the customer is always right” loop, stop calling your internal “clients” “clients.” Make it “project partners” instead.

Unlike a rose, an approval process by any other name changes the way people think.

3. Come up with a good comeback.

After choosing new eyeglass frames for my pop-bottle lenses, I asked the guy behind the counter whether I could pick up my new specs in an hour.

“Oh, honey,” he said, “I’d never do that to you!”

With that comment, the clerk reframed my perspective. I suddenly stopped thinking of one-hour eyeglasses as a helpful convenience to seek. Instead, they’d become shoddy merchandise to avoid.

That’s a great comeback for a communicator being pressured by clients to deliver work on an unreasonable deadline, to hit “accept all changes” on review copy or to run a 200-word paragraph: “Oh, honey, I’d never do that to you.”

A communicator in one of my writing workshops uses a different comeback when her reviewers start coming up with new material for an otherwise focused piece:

“That is a GREAT idea!” she says. “For another piece!
Thanks for calling it to my attention. I’ll put that on our future story ideas sheet.”

What comeback could you use to reframe your reviewer’s perspective?

‘You’re going to need a bigger boat.’

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that getting a handle on the approval process is our top communication challenge.

Not creating a great brochure. Not getting the annual report out. Not developing an intranet that improves employee performance.

But creating a process that allows us to do those things well.

Improve approvals

Want to master the art of managing the approval process?

• Read Ann’s “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” handbook.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on managing the approval process at RevUpReadership.com.
• Find Ann’s out about Ann’s next “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” teleseminar.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2007 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.