Plain English is not an oxymoron

A shout-out to my colleague Susan Weiner, investment writer and blogger, for her recent post on plain language and compliance, a consistently vexing topic for financial professionals.

The post concerns Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please, a book by Joseph Kimble. Kimble is an often-cited advocate for “Plain English” who has taught legal writing for nearly 30 years. But it will also lead you to two documents that, despite their length, are exemplars of clear writing. Even a brief scan of these documents will reward you with something you can do to communicate more clearly in writing.

The first document is a guide to creating clear SEC disclosure documents, published by the SEC and titled simply A Plain English Handbook. The fact that it was written in 1998 is at first discouraging. Reading corporate disclosure documents today makes clear that far too few organizations have taken these ideas to heart in the ensuing fifteen years. On the other hand, it does demonstrate that clear writing can be timeless. How many other documents written fifteen years ago can offer guidance you can use today? If nothing else, read it for the preface by Warren Buffett and the introduction by then SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt. If I told you they were written yesterday, you would believe me.

The second document is the Federal Plain Language Guidelines, written in 2011. It may be the easiest-to-understand 118 page document you’ve ever read, and that’s precisely the point.

Not surprisingly, you will find consistent and often identical advice in both documents. Many of the ideas won’t be surprises either, but the reminders are welcome nonetheless. (Did I just slip into the passive tense?) The examples are clear and illuminating. If you don’t have time to click through to these two gems, here are the key points. As further evidence of how effective these documents are, I took the points more or less directly from the table of contents:

• Your Audience
  • Identify and write for your audience
  • Address separate audiences separately
• Your Document’s Organization
  • Organize to meet your readers’ needs
  • Go from the general to the specific
  • Address one person, not a group
  • Use lots of useful headings
  • Write short sections
• Your Choice of Language
  • Active Verbs
  • Speak to the reader (“You”)
  • Use short sentences
  • Use short paragraphs, one topic per paragraph
  • Use examples, lists and tables to clarify