Put uptight out of sight

How to ditch performance anxiety and sound relaxed and articulate when you write for work

Part one of a two-part piece on how to write for work with the ease and elegance of a fluffy cloud, drifting across the horizon of your audience’s experience.?

I don’t even know what that means but it sounds nice and relaxed, doesn’t it??

Unlike the article itself which is quite ranty. Part two is decidedly less grumpy and more practical. Probably. I can’t make any promises.

If you asked me whether I’d rather fill in a complicated form or lick Donald Trump’s nipple, I’d be unbuttoning the bouffant buffoon’s shirt before you’d finished posing the question.*?

When it comes to bureaucracy, I have the capability of a ripped bin bag. And an adeptness at wriggling out of it that would make a vaselined eel seethe with jealousy.?

I comfort myself by believing it’s probably some exciting facet of undiagnosed neurodiversity but that doesn’t help me when I have to apply for a mortgage or a passport, does it?

Setting up my business email address took three months, five people helping, and a string of support tickets so long it was like hitting the jackpot down the seafront arcades. I actually cried. More than once.

The instructions were preposterous. When I asked for help, I got this initial reply (copied verbatim and in total):

“With a domain registration you only have the tools to point a domain at a server using nameservers, if you need to add individual MX records for a domain you will need access to a DNS Management interface which isnt available with a domain registration on your account here and is something that our clients typically do from their web hosting panel. In your case I would recommend setting up an account with cloudflare who offer a free DNS management service and you will be able to update the domains nameservers to look at that account with cloudflare and can then securely manage those records from that new cloudflare account.”

Well, it made sense to them.

It doesn’t have to be this way

In stark contrast, I recently managed to open a Monzo account without even breaking sweat.?

The application process was designed beautifully. It set me up for success by telling me, in advance, everything I’d need. It took me through, step by step, asking questions clearly. It used active language, a friendly font and great visuals. The experience made me feel confident and even a little bit clever.

Monzo, my friends: I came for the mobile-first functionality (and, let’s be honest, the coral card) and fell in love with the interface.

So, why doesn’t every business or organisation do the same?

Tone deaf communication

Because most of them put more focus on their own needs than on what matters to their audience. Or, more accurately, they don’t truly think about parts of the customer journey at all.

Content design is increasingly recognised as a vital facet of communication – particularly on the web – but it’s often noticeably lacking at our biggest, most established businesses, who rely on the magnetic pull of their size to avoid bothering.

Often, it’s the young upstarts (yes, the Monzo gang) who design better, starting from scratch to establish fresh systems around the customer’s needs and behaviours, rather than bending us around antique processes.

Sure, it’s harder to turn around a battleship, but the government’s enormous .gov.uk online content, designed by the wonderful Sarah Winters, is a beacon of clarity. And that’s all the proof I need? that there’s no earthly reason why everyone else can’t follow suit.

You’re Latin yourself down

Here's a tiny example of a bigger problem. The other day, I was forced to fill in a form (sadly, no-one was offering me old Gingervitis’s nips as a get-out). It asked about salary. You had to type in a number and then choose from a drop-down that offered a choice of:

• Per annum
• A month
• A week.

Why would anyone write ‘per annum’ instead of simply ‘a year’? A year fits with the other options. It’s easy to understand. It’s in English – not Latin. This was a college – a place of education, inclusivity and communication.

Going all Victorian

I see it all the time: perfectly articulate people sit down to write something for the workplace and they immediately tense up. Maybe it happens to you.

You’re so anxious about getting it ‘wrong’ that you hop in a time machine and whizz-pop back to the days when clerks, lawyers and the like routinely bamboozled their clients with Latin terminology, impenetrable legalese and tortured sentence construction.

Their agenda back then? To create enough of a smokescreen of bafflement to enable them to rinse people for increasing amounts of easy money. Largely, in order to maintain the power and keep the filthy public in their gutter-based place.

That nonsense still goes on, of course. Politicians, snake oil salesmen, psychics and slopey-shouldered officials walk among us, just waiting for us to swallow their baloney.

Ditch the time machine

But most of the people who pepper us with workplace gobbledegook (again, this might be you, white-knuckling an email in your time machine) have perfectly legitimate goals.?

You’re probably a lovely person. You probably write fun messages in birthday cards. And you’re probably typing away in front of a poster that proudly proclaims your organisation’s values of friendliness and inclusivity.

But because you’re at work, you somehow think you have to write like a very downtrodden character from a Dickens novel and include phrases such as 'per annum', 'polite notice' and 'due to unforeseen circumstances'.

It’s time to loosen up.

In part two, I’ll suggest some tips on how to avoid sounding like a Victorian bureaucrat and instead, make your audiences feel soothed and a little bit clever.

*And I’ll explain why I started this article with such a deeply unpleasant sentence. For which I can only apologise. Sorry. I'm off to rinse my brain out with soap and water.