{"id":896,"date":"2018-07-05T21:28:26","date_gmt":"2018-07-05T21:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/?p=896"},"modified":"2018-07-05T21:28:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T21:28:26","slug":"what-we-have-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/what-we-have-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Jim Purdy (Retired author, trainer, colleague, mentor, and friend.) \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Since my father died two years ago, my 81-year-old mother has received correspondence from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Every time she gets a letter from the DVA, I get an anxious phone call.<\/p>\n

\"badShe can\u2019t make head nor tails of what the letter is saying and is frightened that they\u2019re taking away her pension. She reads the letter to me over the phone, but I can\u2019t make head nor tails of it either. So, to allay my mothers growing hysteria, I hurry over to her living room. There, I attempt to isolate some semblance of decipherable meaning. Yet, even though I\u2019m a professional writer with a BA in English, I still cannot make head nor tails of it. The best I can do is compile a list of questions for my mother to ask the DVA when she phones them. And sure enough, on the phone the next day, the DVA spokesperson calmly and clearly explains what the letter is about.<\/p>\n

My question is \u201cWhy couldn\u2019t the letter she received achieve what the phone call did?\u201d This means that the letters that go out are not really the communication. They are simply the prelude \u2013 a kind of cue \u2013 for the recipient to make a phonecall so they can receive the real lowdown on what it\u2019s about.<\/p>\n

Then, last month, I met a communications officer from the DVA. I told her about my mother\u2019s experiences and the DVA woman smiled and said \u201cI know exactly what you mean. I can\u2019t make head nor tails of them either.\u201d She went on to describe how she\u2019s pushing for clearer communications at the DVA, trying to make the letters actually serve the needs of the recipients. To do so, she\u2019s begun teaching courses to the DVA on Plain Language.<\/p>\n

Plain Language is about communicating with readers \u2013 be they the widows of veterans or members of a Defined Contribution pension plan, or any user of a product or service \u2013 so that they understand the message in the same sense as it is meant to be understood.<\/p>\n

Live And Die On Communications<\/strong>
\nBut any and all organizations live and die on communications, both internally and externally, to function efficiently and productively. Vast libraries worth of information are generated and distributed via eMail, websites, smartphone, and paper documentation. That information literally runs businesses.<\/p>\n

As Tony Comper, former president and CEO of the BMO Financial Group, put it: \u201cWe aren\u2019t in the business of managing money. We are in the business of managing information about money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, a lot of this information is greeted in the same way as my mother greeted the letter from the DVA. It\u2019s very difficult to make head or tails of it. Such failure to communicate causes performance mistakes, poor decision-making, inefficient operations, and loss of productivity and profitability. Thus, Plain Language is needed in communications so everyone can do their jobs better and improve bottom-line performance.<\/p>\n

This goes for \u2013 indeed, especially for \u2013 highly educated and literate professionals. Reducing the complexity of the language and focusing on the needs of the reader goes a long way towards effectively communicating. It\u2019s not the information that gets simplified, but rather the message so that complex information can be more readily understood and put to work.\"Concept<\/p>\n

Beyond Plain Language principles, there are the principles of usability. This takes us beyond grammar and vocabulary and into cognitive psychology and information typing. Cognitive psychology helps us understand how the brain actually processes information. Presenting information according to cognitive principles means we\u2019re presenting information in the way that the brain naturally prefers it and can readily process it. Information typing categorizes all information based on its purpose and intent for the user. \u00a0Defining how the user is going to use this information means that we\u2019re presenting the information in the way the user needs it.<\/p>\n

Made Comprehensible <\/strong>
\nThe benefits of this approach to communication are unassailable. Even the most complex, difficult, and impenetrable topics can be made comprehensible using Plain Language and usability principles. Indeed, any organization that is not addressing its communications in this way is failing to maximize its key resource \u2013 its knowledge. Failing to maximize knowledge in a knowledge economy means failure.<\/p>\n

Subject matter experts on veterans\u2019 affairs or on any other topic need to stop writing and start communicating. They need to stop focusing on the content in isolation from the people who need to use the content. Subject matter experts, who once learned how to write, must now learn how to communicate. Getting clear, usable communications directly from the horse\u2019s mouth can only benefit everyone.<\/p>\n

Jim Purdy is the former Precision Content author and plain language guru.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Jim Purdy (Retired author, trainer, colleague, mentor, and friend.) \u00a0 Since my father died two years ago, my 81-year-old mother has received correspondence from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Every time she gets a letter from the DVA, I get an anxious phone call. She can\u2019t make head nor tails of what the letter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[12,20,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.precisioncontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}