This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Well, all that we’ve been talking about so far, I think leads us to the issue of responsibility, who is responsible for communication?
Who is responsible for communication?
Is it the writer or is it the reader?
Now I’m going to come down pretty solidly on the side that says, I reckon it’s the writer who needs to take prime responsibility for communication.
Now obviously, the reader needs to be involved and they do need to make an effort. They can’t just stick your document under their pillow at night, and expect the information to waft in. It doesn’t work that way. They do need to make an effort.
But the prime responsibility for communication lies with the person who has initiated that communication. That is the writer.
And so when I write a document and somebody comes back to me and says, well, I just really didn’t understand all that. I don’t respond with you idiot. No, I take responsibility as the writer in writing that text, I didn’t find the right words. The right structures, the right way of expressing things that made it easy for that person to understand. So I as the writer, take responsibility.
Or if somebody comes to me and says I read the first page of that document, but I haven’t got to the end of it yet. I don’t respond with Gee, you’re lazy. Now again, I take responsibility as the writer. In that first page, I didn’t engage my reader and show them how vital and important this information is. I didn’t give them reason to keep on reading to the very end.
The writer is responsible
Now putting the responsibility on the writer rather than the reader, I think is a bit of a turn around from how we traditionally understand written communication. I think traditionally we understand it is the reader’s job to figure out what that clever writer was saying. And I suspect we might get that attitude fairly early on in life, maybe in our early school days. School is the first time that we encounter written communication in a formal setting.
Now you can look at my face and you can see it’s been a really, really long time since I went to school. One of the things we did was an exercise called comprehension, and I think they’d still do something similar today. The teacher gives the class something to read and then ask some questions about it. The kids that can answer those questions, they’re labelled as smart. The kids that can’t, they’re labelled as dumb.
And that process, and that labelling pretty much, continues throughout much of our education as we move through Infant School primary school, our secondary education and maybe even in our tertiary studies. And I think we end up at work with an underlying attitude that says if people can’t read and understand something, they are either stupid or lazy or both.
I want to challenge that attitude and say, well, look, maybe if people can’t read and understand, perhaps the writer hasn’t done their job well enough. Perhaps they haven’t worked hard enough at making sure that people could find and understand that information. Maybe they haven’t found the right structures or the right ways of wording things.
So I think as writers we do need to take a fair bit of responsibility for the content that we produce, for the text that we produce.
Another thing we need to keep in mind as writers is to never just throw information at readers. Never take the attitude: Here’s a bunch of facts. You figure out what they mean.
Include the ‘so what?’
I’ve been working in business and government for quite a few decades now, and my observation is that those jobs that used to be there that merely collected information, they’re pretty much gone. What we expect people to do now is yes, go and get me some information. I do need all that data, but tell me what it means. That’s called analysis.
And so the ‘So what’ information becomes really important in just about all the documents that we write.
So I think it would be really dangerous to have a couple of sentences like these on their own. It would be really dangerous to assume that your readers understand what a Z score of 3.15 is all about, but more importantly, what does this mean? Does this mean I could ignore that sample? Or do I need to close down the factory?
The ‘so what’ information is really important because in business and government people use information. They need to respond in some way.
Now throughout this course I might refer to people as users or audience or readers or something like that. But I really like the term users.
Writers craft information products that people use
It highlights that what I’m doing is I’m producing an information product that somebody needs to use, they need to respond to it some way. They’ll need to perhaps make a decision or follow a procedure or do something, but they will need to respond in some way to this information product that I’m providing for them.
That means, I think our old model of communication probably needs to change. Our old model of communication looks something like this – ideas moving from one head to another head, and there was no modification to those ideas. That’s good, but not good enough. I think what we want now is, yes, we do want our writing to be understood so people get the things that we’ve written in our documents. But more importantly, we want them to be acted on because the documents we’re producing are functional documents. Whether they’re internal documents or whether they’re for an external audience, they’re designed to do something.
That means whenever we write anything, we need to make sure that we are very much focused on our user. So whether that person’s just an individual or whether it’s a group of people they need to be front and centre all the time. Whenever we write anything.
And if we ever want to make a judgement about how effective our writing is. We look at our user. Has this document had the impact on them that we expected it to have that we designed for it to have?
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