How clear are your documents?

When British Telecom produced a clearer bill in plain English it received around 25% fewer enquiries each quarter. Customers also paid their bills more promptly, improving cash flow and reducing the cost of collecting overdue bills. Before the change BT had been receiving around a million calls a year about its bills.

A local authority customer of ours sent out 14,900 Housing Benefit/Council Tax discount 'review' forms that we had edited for them. They got 13,500 back within 10 days, saving thousands of pounds in reminder action and potential overpayments.

If rewriting just one document can save organisations so much time and money, think how much you could save if you applied plain English to every form, leaflet and letter you produce! Or, to look at it another way, how much might it be costing your organisation if your documents aren't as clear as they could be? No one enjoys reading documents that are full of jargon, buzzwords or 'officialese'.

Our editing service

The aim of the service is to make sure your documents are readable, easy to understand and achieve what they are meant to. Every document is different, and often their intended readership will be too. So we will change our approach to suit the document. We won't be dogmatic and tell you "you've got to say it this way". We work with you to give you the documents you want and need (or more to the point: the documents your readers want and need).

How does the editing service work?

We will give you a free estimate for each document you send us. The amount of the estimate will depend on the size of the document and how much work we will need to do to bring it up to standard. For large documents, or for jobs containing several documents, there will be a discount. So if you have a lot of documents it will be well worth your while to send them all to us at once! We will not start work until you accept our estimate.

We will edit your document in Word format, using track changes, for no extra charge.

Once your document is crystal clear why not have it plain English approved? Our plain English approved logo will tell your readers that the document they have picked up is easy to read and understand.

Our guarantee

We will send you our invoice with the completed work, but we do not expect you to pay anything until you are satisfied with the work we have done. When you receive the edited document we will be happy to discuss any points with you, particularly where you feel we have misinterpreted the original meaning. This hardly ever happens, but if it does we can usually sort it out in one short phone call. We ask that you consider the document carefully within 30 days of receiving it, and let us know if there are any problems.

Links to more information

plain English approval
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ask for a quote

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