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Document analysis and improvement
Plain English skills and residency
Developing forms and precedents
Plain English organisational culture
Document analysis and improvement
We analyse and improve existing documents to make sure that they can be easily understood and really say what you need them to say. Vital for:
- documents which need to be acted on – instructions, requests, or advice
- internal policies
- documents which need to be persuasive, such as bids or tenders
- contracts
- frequently used letters
Plain English skills and residency
The most effective way to develop your organisation’s plain English skills is through our residence programme, where we do the work actually based in your office for a period of time (or perhaps a day or two per week). This means we are available at any time for advice, discussion and ad hoc training.
To maintain the standard of your documents, we recommend a regular review programme so that every significant document is re-checked every couple of years. This can be done as part of a residency, or on an ad hoc basis.
Developing forms and precedents
We can develop or re-engineer your forms or questionnaires to make them easier to fill out accurately. Everyone likes to complain about filling out forms – if yours are easy and straightforward, you have an easy win with your customers.
We can also develop standard forms or letters for you to use internally. If you find yourself writing the same type of letter frequently, we can save you a lot of time by developing it into a form with fields to be filled out.
Plain English writing courses
We offer in-house courses in plain English writing, which can be tailored to your particular organisation. Courses cover topics such as writing for your reader, language use, design and layout, grammar, and techniques for particular types of documents.
We also offer in-depth training on particular types of legal documents (agreements, contracts, advices, court forms and pleadings), which are suitable for lawyers and non-lawyers. They are particularly relevant for non-lawyers who prepare these documents regularly.
We highly recommend our document workshop, where you identify a few documents you want to improve and we work on them as a small group exercise. This amounts to a real-world training exercise for participants, and simultaneously provides you with better documents – an excellent two-for-one deal.
Plain English organisational culture
If you want to review your communication style across your organisation, we can advise on what needs to be done and how to go about it. This can include training and document review, but also extend to:
- reviewing the communication style of your organisation as a whole;
- developing a corporate styleguide;
- identifying forms and documents that can be standardised or turned into precedents;
- developing a structure where the quality of written communication is monitored and prioritised.
We highly recommend doing this through a residency programme, as there are often many questions and a lot of brainstorming and workshopping to be done.