Consulting Journal: Writing

Writing: Readability

by David Blakey

Consultants' reports should not read like legal documents.

[Monday 21 October 2002]

Before I get to my main point, I would like to examine abbreviations such as ‘ie’ and ‘eg’. (I shall explain shortly why I prefer ‘ie’, without punctuation, rather than ‘i.e.’

Consider these examples.

We need to conduct more market research on trends in Web Services, ie, we need to discover which of your significant customers will invest significantly in this area.

If you substitute the words ‘that is’ for ‘ie’, then the sentence is not grammatical. So will a semi-colon work better?

We need to conduct more market research on trends in Web Services; ie, we need to discover which of your significant customers will invest significantly in this area.

Now there is not only the pause caused by the semi-colon, but the slow progress through the individual letters ‘i’ and ‘e’ that immediately follow it. In English, vowels sounds rarely appear consecutively, unless they ‘elide’. Consider the word ‘vacuous’; it is pronounced smoothly through the pair of vowel sounds. Without elision, as in ‘ie’, we are forced to insert a small gap - a glottal stop.

It does not help if you use periods, as in ‘i.e.’. The sentence then has a lot of punctuation marks clustered together.

We need to conduct more market research on trends in Web Services; i.e., we need to discover which of your significant customers will invest significantly in this area.

This is my argument for leaving the periods out and just writing ‘ie’. If you have a comma after ‘i.e.’, it looks ugly.

Now see how much better the sentence looks if you drop the abbreviation entirely.

We need to conduct more market research on trends in Web Services; that is, we need to discover which of your significant customers will invest significantly in this area.

This is a lot better, and you can also apply it to ‘eg’. Usually, ‘for example’ will work better.

There is a tendency for some consultants to write reports as if they were legal documents or bills to be presented to the House or technical textbooks. All three of these use abbreviations such as ‘ie’ and ‘eg’. Some of them go even further, using ‘cf’ for ‘compare with’ and ‘qv’ for ‘refer to’. A report for a client should be less stilted and more readable. It should sound good if it is read out loud.

At the other end of the readable scale from these legal or technical documents are novels. A novel should grab its readers' attention and persuade them to keep reading. One of the highest compliments that can be paid to a novel is for a reviewer to say: ‘I couldn't put it down’. You do not want to go this far with a report to a client. You want your client to pause and think throughout the report, so they should not be tempted to read it through because they are carried away by its style rather than its content.

If you can do it, you might consider making your reports like an article in something like the Consulting Journal. If I have written an article well, you should read it all the way through; it should hold your interest through its style and its changes of pace and mood. When you have finished reading it, you should say to yourself: ‘Yes, that made some good points’. You might even return to the article to re-read those points. This is where layout matters. If I have written an article well, you should be able to find the main points of interest immediately.

You could, as I said, try this with reports for your clients. Here are my tips for doing it.

Keep the writing smooth

Avoid abbreviations. Avoid ‘jerky’ punctuation. Read it out loud to check how it sounds.

Keep the style consistent

You are taught to use active verbs rather than passive verbs. If you put a passive sentence in an active report, it can stand out as being weak. Your client might think that you are not sure that what you are saying is true.

Paradoxically, if you are a skillful writer, the passive voice can be used occasionally to emphasize a point. (I have just done it.)

Change the mood and pace

You are not going to write like a novelist. Your readers are not going to be treated to a roller-coaster ride through their emotions. But you can keep their interest. Shorten sentences. Use short words. Then change the pace again. Make sentences longer and increase the length of the words.

It is useful to learn some of the techniques used by journalists, columnists and copy writers. You should avoid being colloquial: ‘do not’ is better than ‘don't’. But, again, you can address your reader directly. If your client is called XYZ, then, instead of writing ‘XYZ should consider ...’, you can write ‘you should consider ...’.

Use layout

One simple way to make information easy for your readers to find again is to use bullet points. You can also use headings.

Another technique is to include it in a block. There is nothing wrong with including special points in a block that is indented, or is surrounded by a border, or has a different background colour. If you use a background colour, make it pale, so that it will still be effective on black-and-white printers.

One major layout technique you should avoid is nested numbering. Some writing coaches say that you should not go beyond three levels, so that a paragraph number 3.2.4. would be acceptable. Personally, I do not number below one level. If you need paragraph 3.b., then there is a problem with your planning of paragraph 3.

I worked for a firm that used numbering for paragraphs in letters, except for the first paragraph.

2. So a letter from them would look like this.

3. Many clients were confused by this strange technique.

If you want a single piece of advice to keep your reports readable, it is to read them out loud. You may be surprised at how often something that seems good on paper sounds stilted and jerky when you read it out loud.

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