The Price of Poor Writing
How much money and time are wasted in:
- Unnecessary support calls caused by unclear instructions?
- Poorly written forms and applications that are badly filled in?
- Manuals, reports, and specifications that are hard to understand?
- Confusing internal procedures and regulations?
- Ineffective memos and business letters that are never answered?
- Undecipherable legal notices and briefs?
- Uninteresting press releases that are ignored by the media?
It is a mistake to think that the costs of poor writing are an unavoidable expense of doing business. Most organizations have no idea how much time and money they spend on writing. Managers, engineers, attorneys, and other highly paid workers spend up to 85 percent of their time writing. You can estimate these costs as well as the savings to be gained from plain language with this simple model:
An Executive's Reading Costs
| Average executive’s reading time for business materials: | 200 words per minute |
| Salary of executive: | $100,000 a year or $50 an hour |
| Reading 10-page document of 5,000 words or 25 minutes: | $20.83 |
| Cost of reading two documents a day for a year: | $10,440 per reading executive |
If the executive requires revisions in half of the materials, the cost increases to $15,660 per year. Multiply these costs by the number of executives in your company to determine the total reading cost.
Staff Writing Costs
| Salary of writer: | $60,000 a year or $30 an hour |
| 10-page document: | 40 hours or $1,200 |
| Cost per year per writer spending 35% of time writing: | $21,000 |
Plain-language methods can cut both writing and reading times by 25 to 50 percent.
Poor Writing and Liability
Poor writing also increases the liability and risks of your organization. In "Total Quality Business Writing" published in The Journal for Quality and Participation (1995), Michael Egan wrote:
- Computer manufacturer Coleco lost $35 million in a single quarter in 1983–and eventually went out of business–when customers purchased its new Adam line of computers, found the instruction manuals unreadable, and rushed to return their computers.
- An oil company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a new pesticide... only to discover that the formula had already been worked out five years earlier–by one of the same company's technicians. He wrote his report so poorly that no one had finished reading it.
- A nuclear plant supervisor ordered "ten foot long lengths" of radioactive material. Instead of getting the ten-foot lengths it needed, the plant received ten one-foot lengths, at a cost so great it was later classified.
- Prof. Dorothy Winsor showed "a history of miscommunication" to be one of the root causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986.
Doing business today requires writing in plain language. Poor writing results in costs you cannot afford to pay.
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