10. Conclusion

Plain language has grown beyond being a movement to become a product, a business, an industry, or a professional service. In the early twenty-first Century, it is almost misleading for plain-language practitioners to talk about their product as a movement.

Yet much remains to be done to improve the clarity of legal, and related, documents. The success to date has been achieved by focussing on:

• traditionally, the social benefits of clear legal communication; and

• more recently, the economic benefits.

These must remain key focuses. But progress has been, as my 11 year old son and 8 year old daughter would have it, "way slow Dad, in fact double way slow".

In too many organizations, important writing tasks are left to someone with other core skills—eg, legal, marketing, or customer service skills.

Also, although many people in many organizations—especially law firms—write for a substantial percentage of their working day, their writing skills are rarely enhanced and even more rarely measured. How can that be? Why is it so?

Yet, every person who writes for an organization helps form the voice of that organization's brand—they are its custodians, champions, and guardians. And for some organizations, the voice of the brand is fundamentally important.

We need to reposition plain language in the eyes of decision-makers in businesses, in law firms, and in government. We need to show those decision-makers that with plain language, their organization’s documents can satisfy and delight everyone who reads those documents. That is so whether the reader is a client, a customer, a patient, a staff member, a distributor, a supplier, a regulator, a judge, an investor, a litigant, or someone reading the law.

To help those decision-makers determine whether the style of their organization's documents is helping or hindering their organization, we should encourage them to measure those documents against their organization's brand values.

It's fairly easy to do that measuring. First, simply ask the people in an organization to comment on their documents. Usually, they say things like "wordy", "formal", "heavy", "repetitive", "worse than boring" etc. Sometimes people go much further than that. Then compare those comments with the organization's brand promise, its values, mission etc. Usually, the gap between their comments and the brand is huge.

After the measuring, we should ask decision-makers:

• "How important is the voice of your brand?"

• "Is your brand's voice aligned with your brand?"

• "How well is the voice of your brand being managed?"

• "Does your organization's structure promote a focus on clarity?"

• "Who in your organization is responsible for how the document's audience receives the message?"

• "Would clearer documents help your organization succeed?"

All of that should help deliver the economic and social benefits of clear communication—because the long-term solutions to the problems of poor communication lie in organizations competing (at least to some extent) on the basis of the plainness of their documents.