International Journal of Business Communication

This article surveys some recent trends in the area of clear writing and highlights some of the issues that face professional writers, people in business and other fields who write as part of their day-to-day work, and those who teach writing. Researchers are beginning to create empirically validated guidelines for writing clear and comprehensible prose and to develop useful theories about clear writing. Writers and editors can use research findings in practical settings.

Here is an example of how certain "practical problems" in readability can be solved.

While readability formulas are intended to help writers and teachers of business communications, the formulas have in fact been counter-productive in several ways. The formulas don't really help writers to predict the reada bility of their prose because they oversimplify, because they have not been calibrated for adult readers, and because reading is so highly individual. In addition, the formulas don't help writers to produce readable documents either; though short sentences and words correlate with difficulty, they do not cause difficulty. Finally, the formulas hamper the teaching of business writing because they emphasize written products instead of the process of writing and because they discourage teachers from employing practical techniques that can develop students' abilities to manipulate stylistic options.

Lawyers are expected to communicate in their own special jargon, legalese, for three reasons: (1) They don't realize that many terms are nothing more than useless legal jargon, or (2) they enjoy a special comaraderie because only they can interpret legalese, or (3) they create a constant need for their own services by making it impossible for a layperson to handle even the simplest legal matter. Unless there is a drastic alteration in what the public expects of their lawyers or a change in what they expect of them selves, lawyers will not be more readable than they now are.

A longer, completer, and duller version of these remarks will be published in Fall, 1981, in Working Papers: A Teacher's Observation on Composition (Scott, Foresman).