Whether or not you’ve taken our tongue-in-cheek style test, if readers need a ball of thread to find their way out of your verbal maze then please read on.

Here’s what our three ‘C’ test sentences – yes, only three! – look like when we put them together:

‘The 3.25 hour interruption to service experienced by customers on the morning of May 24th 2013, was the result of a rare but highly virulent file infector virus which entered our centralised IT system during a scheduled bi-monthly update of anti-virus software, for which we are sorry. Our terms and conditions, which were revised on 1st September 2013, stipulate that in order for us to perform all the administrative tasks that are required to process cancellation requests and update our records, we can only accept cancellations where we have been notified in writing three days in advance. We are always keen to hear our customers’ views – that is why we set up our dedicated email facility which we launched on 1st April 2010, since when we have received an impressive 3,012 responses from clients and interested members of the public – so contact us now.’

An incredible 146 words! If your intention is to decimate the tree population then you’re off to a great start. If you were hoping to impress, brace yourself for disappointment. Call us busy or lazy, the odds of us bothering to read enough to spot your brilliance are slim.

We know that being ‘transparent’ is de rigueur these days, but there are limits. Far from being admirably informative, our Pedant is more likely to be thought of as a long-winded know-it-all. So, here’s what you need to do.

• Think of your readers – Put yourself in their position. Would you want to wade through lines and lines of irrelevant information in the hope of finding something useful? Exactly. And if your readers don’t have to, chances are they won’t even try.
• Identify your point and stick to it – If your message is important enough to write about, it’s important that your readers can grasp it. Always keep the purpose of your document in mind and stick to your subject.
• Help readers get to the point – In all three sentences we arrive at the important bits – we’re sorry; cancel three days in advance; contact us now – only by following a very long, congested and circuitous route. Don’t assume that everyone will bother to make it that far. Help them by ditching the chatter and bringing your main messages to the fore.
• Leave out irrelevant details – Do readers need to know what caused the IT to fail, what goes on in the intervening three days before cancellation or how many visitors you’ve had to your website? No – none of these is relevant to the main points. Dates, lengths of time, schedules, number of responses etc. are also unnecessary here.
• Don’t talk technical – Unless you’re writing for a technical audience, avoid this urge. File infector virus, bi-monthly update, anti-virus software, centralised – all extraneous details that will turn off, rather than turn on, your readers.

Less is more – Do everything we’ve said above and the words will fall away!

Whether or not you’ve taken our tongue-in-cheek style test, if you write like George Dubya speaks, then please read on.

Here’s what our three ‘A’ style test sentences look like when put together:

‘The people supposed to be looking after our PCs misunderestimated what they had to do. From now on no-one can cancellate the deal without 3 days’ notice! If what we’re saying resignates with you and even if it doesn’t it’d be grate to hear from you ;).’

There’s Plain English and there’s plain unprofessional! Writing like this is the equivalent of not thinking before you speak. At best you might earn yourself some free exposure – but as the latest Facebook ‘funny’, at what cost to your reputation?

On a positive note, at a mere 46 words you certainly win on brevity. Nor could you be accused of speaking down to readers. If you want to convince people that you are worth paying attention to, though, here are some tips on what you most definitely should NOT do.

• Write without thinking – All business documents have a purpose, an intended audience and a point to get across. A successful communicator takes all three into account when deciding how and what to write.
• Make up words – Shakespeare may have made an art of it, but these days making up words is more likely to shout ignorance than inspired creativity. While I confess to inventing ‘cancellate’ for the purpose of this demonstration, you may thank George W Bush for misunderestimated and resignates.
• Be careless with spelling and punctuation – If you can’t be bothered to get these right, what else don’t you bother with? That’s the impression sloppy writing gives readers. Rightly or wrongly, mistakes of this kind also cause people to question our intelligence and ability.
• Blame others – Taking responsibility when things go wrong, especially when they are not our fault, earns respect. There is, though, a solution where no-one need take the blame and that is by using the depersonalising passive voice – e.g. the breakdown was caused by a fault in the IT system.(See *Be active below for why we do not normally advocate use of the passive.)
• Use contractions – With the advent of social media many of the old rules of formal writing no longer hold sway. Nevertheless using contractions such as we’re and doesn’t in business documents still tends to be frowned upon, while awkward-sounding constructions like it’d should always be avoided.
• Be too casual – Contractions we have covered above, but also included here are what could be considered dismissive terms and phrases (e.g. the people, PCs), numbers, exclamation marks and emoticons.

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*Be active – Active verbs make it clear who is doing the acting. Passive verbs make you sound impersonal and aloof. So usually better to say, e.g. we currently use instead of is currently used; and, you can contact us instead of we can be contacted.