There is a particular kind of document that circulates inside every organization. It is four pages long, grammatically perfect, and impossible to disagree with, because it does not quite say anything. Everyone reads it. Nobody can tell you afterwards what it proposed. It is not written badly. It is written to survive.
I have written that document, more than once, and I have come to think of it as the natural output of a system rather than a personal failing. Vagueness is cheap and clarity is expensive, and organizations will buy the cheap thing unless someone deliberately pays for the expensive one.
Why clarity costs so much
A clear sentence commits you. "We should improve the onboarding experience" commits you to nothing; it is compatible with every possible future. "Half of new users never finish setup, so we are cutting the setup flow from nine steps to three by June" can be wrong in four distinct ways, and every one of them has your name on it.
That is the real expense. Not the writing time — the exposure. You have to know the number, choose the deadline, name the tradeoff, and accept that in six months someone can hold the sentence up against reality. Vague prose is not a style choice. It is insurance.
Most bad writing inside companies is not confusion. It is a correctly priced response to the risk of being specific.
Which means you cannot fix it with a style guide. If being specific is punished, people will write beautifully and say nothing, and they will be right to.
The useful side effect
The reason to pay the cost anyway has little to do with the reader. Writing a clear sentence forces you to finish a thought you were comfortable leaving unfinished. You discover the missing number when you go to write it down. You discover that two people meant different things by "the launch" when you try to define it in one line. You discover, embarrassingly often, that the strategy you have been confidently describing in meetings cannot be stated in a paragraph at all.1
Talking does not do this. Speech is forgiving: you can gesture, repeat yourself, read the room and adjust, and land somewhere everyone feels fine about without ever having been precise. Prose is unforgiving in exactly the way thinking needs to be. The sentence either resolves or it does not, and you are alone with it.
What I look for
When I read a document now, I look for a small number of things, and none of them are about prose quality.
- Is there a claim that could be wrong? If nothing in the document could turn out to be false, there is nothing in the document.
- Are the numbers load-bearing? Figures used as decoration are a bad sign; a figure that the recommendation depends on is a good one.
- Is the tradeoff named? Every real proposal gives something up. A proposal with no cost section has not been thought through, or is hiding the cost.
- Who does what by when? Passive voice is usually harmless. Passive voice in the action section is a tell.
The cheap version of the discipline
If you want one habit rather than a philosophy: write the conclusion as a single sentence before you write anything else, and refuse to soften it until the draft is finished. If you cannot write that sentence, you do not yet have a document — you have a topic. That distinction has saved me more time than any tool I have ever adopted.
And then, once it exists, protect the people who write like that. The cost of clarity is paid by the author and collected by everyone else, which is precisely the kind of trade that stops happening the moment it goes unrewarded.2