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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A clear purpose for your document
Well, hopefully you’ve been able to do a bit of thinking about the purpose of your document and look if your answers to the questions overlap a little bit, that’s OK. It’s just about trying to unpack purpose.
I know thinking about purpose in this way is not brand new thinking because you’ve already got this document in mind. You’re already have a sense of what it’s trying to do. But I suspect as I’ve asked you to write down the purpose, that’s become a little bit clearer and your focus has sharpened up a little bit.
I think there really is good value in writing down and being very clear what your purpose of the document is.
And I also hope that you’ve been able to write that final sentence. As a result of reading this document, you want a particular user to do something. Now, when you write that sentence, it does not need to be long and convoluted and complex. It just needs to be clear.
Use your purpose statement to evaluate document effectiveness
If you have a sentence like that, you now have a way of evaluating your document. You’ve just said this is what I want the document to do. You’ve written it down as a result of reading this, I want somebody to respond in some particular way.
So that’s now an evaluation question for the effectiveness of your document. You’ll write your document, send it where it needs to go, and then you can observe what impact it has had. It is a great evaluation question.
Different types of purpose statements
Now in your purpose statement, you might have been talking about somebody doing something, and so your purpose statement might include words like getting somebody to sign or a follow a procedure or approve something or provide something, or maybe even not do something.
There are some types of documents where we actually want people not to respond. I guess I’ve got in mind there sometimes if we’re getting questions from the public, people are writing in letters and asking us questions. One of the things, one of the purposes in our response, will be that they don’t follow up with any more questions. That we stop that communication because that can be a black hole for time. So that might be possible.
It may be that your purpose statement is was all about somebody deciding something, and the sorts of words you might have used there might have been. Choose maybe, or approve again. But those types of words, that type of action, of deciding something is always ultimately directed at somebody doing something.
Your purpose statement might have been all around somebody knowing something, and you might have used words like understand or even feel. But again, those types of purposes are ultimately directed at somebody, perhaps deciding something and then doing something.
So purpose is really important I think when we come to write any document.
A weakness of ISO 24495-1
I’ll just come back to this diagram that I showed you earlier with the needs of the user and the intent of the organisation. Let me say that I think that ISO standard that I introduced before, the international standard on plain language guidelines and principles, that standard sits pretty much on that branch that’s thinking about the needs of the user.
I do recommend you do everything in that standard, but I think there is a weakness in it in that it doesn’t really deal well with intent. It doesn’t cover the purpose of your communication.
So please make sure that you before you start writing you’re very clear about why you are doing this and the intent that you have for this document. And that’s because what I think we need in both government and businesses when organisations are producing documents, we actually want purpose driven communication.
Purpose driven communication
We want purpose driven communication, that is user centred.
So we do want to keep in mind all those principles and ideas about writing for our reader. But we do need to be very clear about our intent.
And I want to say that that’s in contrast to having user driven communication. We do want to have purpose driven communication that is user centred. If we have user driven communication, there’s a chance that we’re going to have the tail wagging the dog if you like.
So being clear about purpose is absolutely essential. Before you start writing.
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