Business Writing

We write more than ever before so shouldn’t we be better at it?  Data shows that we aren’t.  In 2004, we spent 3.1 billion dollars in remedial writing instruction for employees (http://EzineArticles.com/4906729).  “Writing is among the most expensive business activities” (www.businesswriting.biz).  I can’t help but wonder what that figure is now.

What has poor writing cost?

“A company called PowerSuasion reviewed nearly 3K emails and found that 16% of emails needed to be written.  That cost equates to, at a company of 10 employees making $30K each and who sent an average of 30 emails a day, employees wasted $12.6K which organizationally is $126K or 21 weeks of lost productivity.”

1. Coleco lost $35million in a single quarter (and eventually went out of business) when customers returned thousands of new home computers because they couldn’t understand the manuals (1983).
2. An oil company spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a new pesticide…only to discover that the formula had already been worked out five years earlier by one of the company’s own technicians.  He wrote his report so poorly that no one finished reading it.
3. A nuclear plant supervisor ordered “ten foot long lengths” of radioactive material.  Instead of getting the ten-foot lengths it needed in the plant received ten one-foot lengths at a cost so great that it was later classified.
4. Prof. Dorothy Winsor showed “a history of miscommunication” to be one of the root causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986.

(Michael Egan, Total Quality Business Writing, Journal for Quality and Participation (1995).

Organizational Successes in Writing

1. FedEx saved $400,000 per year by rewriting operations manuals to make it 80% less time consuming for users.
2. When the FCC rewrote some regulations, the agency was able to reassign five full-time employees who were previously assigned to answering public questions.
3. When the US Army rewrote a memo to 129 officers, those who received the more readable version were twice as likely to act.
4. After technical writers at GE rewrote the software manuals, customer calls dropped by 125 calls/customer thereby saving the company $375,000 a year for each business customer.
5. The US Navy learned that it could save $27million to $37million a year in officer time by rewriting its business memos.  Officers were able to read the revised memos in 17 to 27 percent less time.

(Joseph Kimble, Chair of Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Research & Writing Department details the above cases)