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Feb 23rd, 2010 by Irene Etzkorn

11 pages instead of 1100 strikes me as right

President Obama unveiled his health care proposal yesterday and I was delighted to finally be able to form an opinion. The key elements of his proposal, available on the White House website, are only 11 pages in length. Prior to this, I really couldn’t express an opinion because I didn’t have the time, inclination or fortitude to read the 1100 page version put forth by Congress. At least now, I can actually understand what he is proposing. I don’t have to rely on spin doctors to interpret for me.

To be clear is to be brave. There is nowhere to hide in brevity. Long-winded legalese is like verbal brush in which all manner of unpleasant consequences can hide. I applaud the presentation of the President’s plan—significant differences from previous, Congressional versions are called out, a table of contents runs alongside the text and the highlights are easily accessible via a prominent tab and easily printed. Unlike previous mind-numbing versions, this one is clear enough to allow me to form an opinion.

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tags: healthcare, simplification

Jan 7th, 2010 by Irene Etzkorn

Legislation that starts as plain language, should stay as plain language

While I applaud Ezra Klein’s notion (Making transparency into a reality, Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog, January 7, 2009 at 12:15 p.m.) of disseminating the plain English documents that are created as the underpinning of Senate legislation, rather than the Bills themselves, why doesn’t anyone ask why the final Bill must be unintelligible? Why are we going through a two-step process to complicate and mystify if we have a source document which is straightforward and intelligible? Perhaps it makes more sense to rethink the structural outline of Senate legislation.

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tags: Transparency, complexity, government solutions, plain English, simplification

Dec 28th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

Plain talk replaces police lingo

I cheered when I read that police departments around the nation are rapidly dropping their “10 code” lingo in favor of Plain Talk radio transmissions. The events of September 11 precipitated the changeover when dozens of emergency responders couldn’t communicate because each had their own set of coded messages.

It is a classic example of how “insider jargon” can be both glamorous and dangerous at the same time. I admit I loved Adam-12 and other television shows and movies that glamorized police jargon—after all responding to a 10-22 sounds a bit more intriguing than chasing a burglar. Speaking in code is fun when it makes you feel part of a club. But, it can be dangerous when it becomes exclusionary in a moment of crisis.

I’m hopeful that the medical profession will jump on this bandwagon. It’s disconcerting when doctors and nurses ask, “How are you doing since the cabbage?” when you have just had major surgery and haven’t eaten in days. Most open heart surgery patients don’t know that a Coronary Bypass is called a cabbage by doctors and nurses (some shortening of Coronary Arterial Bypass and Graft).

So, over and out for now.

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tags: clarity, complexity, jargon, plain English, simplicity, simplification

Nov 5th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

Well-intentioned but misguided

Food marketers have latched onto the idea that having only a few ingredients will make their products appealing to consumers “Marketers such as Starbucks discover that simple sells,” USA Today, October 28, 2009). This is as bad as using readability formulas to judge whether a document is understandable.

What consumers really crave is a short list of familiar, wholesome ingredients. We respond to the idea of just five ingredients because we assume that those five won’t be dehydrated potato flakes, monosodium glutamate, whey solids, artificial coloring and artificial flavoring.

A shorter list may be quicker to read and therefore more transparent, but transparency itself is not the goal—we need to focus on what is revealed behind the curtain. To know all is definitely not to forgive all.

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tags: plain English, simplicity, simplification

Sep 14th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

How Target Came Close to the Bulls-Eye

Yesterday, Target Stores ran a very interesting two-page ad in the nation’s major Sunday newspapers. It showed five customer e-mails that were essentially complaints about Target’s customer service and provided five very clear, action-oriented responses. What was most refreshing was that they acknowledged flaws: “You could do a much better job of replenishing your stock, especially in food” and “Can you please have your employees be more friendly and say ‘thank you’?” What’s more, there was no weasel-wording, no equivocation in the responses. It would have been far more common for the company to respond by saying you must have met our only rude clerk. Instead, they described exactly what their customer service expectations are for friendly service and provided the specifics of the behavior they expect from their checkout personnel. They also made it clear that they had provided personal replies to each customer email and provided a link to solicit any ongoing feedback.

So, if they sincerely want one more comment, I do have one small gripe. The ad stated, “On May 31st, we published an invitation in this newspaper: Tell us what more we can do for you. 627 of you e-mailed Target…” When I read that in Newsday I interpreted it to mean 627 people from that readership but then I read the same figure in The New York Times later that day. So, I presume the total national response was only 627 people—how small was this previously published “invitation?”—now I picture it being one of those legal notices and perhaps not such an earnest request for feedback. So, in my opinion, Target came close to a bulls-eye but fell a bit short of the mark.

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tags: brand, clarity, simplicity

Sep 8th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

$25 billion? Use Short Form; $100,000? Use Long Form

Little did I expect to find a nugget of simplification in an article about Henry Paulson and the distribution of TARP money, but that is exactly what I found in the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. It seems that while homeowners were asked to read and sign dozens of pages of legalese to get measly home mortgages, the CEOs of the nation’s major banks signed a lightly populated two-page commitment to borrow billions. Consisting of four clear, concise bullet points, the “Application for TARP Capital Purchase Program” demonstrates that the need to get something done is best achieved through brevity and clarity. There was no time for the banks to take the application away for legal review and wordsmithing—four clear, one-sentence bullet points stated the commitment each bank was making.

If billions can be borrowed on a short form, can simplified applications for car loans, mortgages, and student loans be far behind? Will the CEOs of these banks consider the time, money, and effort they would save if they adopted this approach in their day-to-day transactions? Why, that would be an economic stimulus in its own right.

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tags: clarity, complexity, information design, simplification

Feb 24th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

My mail is killing me. Well, only one letter—the one from the tree-spraying company—actually discussed calling the poison control center. But every day, I get a letter from one company or another who is trying to hoodwink me, treat me like a number, confuse me or scare me. What’s more, they are doing the same to all of my friends and neighbors. Eventually, these seemingly small but annoying interactions become the memorable aspects of my relationship with these companies.

Con, dupe, brush-off and scare. These are hardly the brand attributes companies aspire to. In one week, I got letters soliciting a maintenance warranty, a thanks for being a customer letter from my cell phone carrier, a dispute resolution letter from a charge card provider and an annual renewal from the tree-spraying company. And here’s what I thought as I opened each of them:

“You are trying to rob defenseless invalids.”
“Using the words ‘hassle-free’ six times in two pages has me worried.”
“If you were any more impersonal, you would have called me customer 1234567.”
“18 pages of warning labels for pesticides—you must be kidding.”

(more…)

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tags: simplification

Feb 4th, 2009 by Irene Etzkorn

Moody’s report on Landry’s laced with jargon

“That kind of wording is not really providing any useful information,” said Irene Etzkorn, director of simplification practice for the consulting firm Siegel + Gale, llc., in New York. The firm recently completed a survey that shows many people say a lack of clarity contributed to the murky Wall Street dealmaking that contributed to the global recession. In short: Firms weren’t clear when they described how a deal worked and investors were too timid or greedy to figure it out themselves. Improving clarity can help rebuild trust, Etzkorn says. Considering they were at the forefront of downfall by failing to forecast problems in many cases, ratings agencies could stand to benefit by writing more clearly about potential risk and reward, she said.”They are under increasing scrutiny for the legitimacy of their ratings,” Etzkorn says. “By weasel-wording, I think it only erodes the confidence.”

Click here to read entire article

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tags: media mention

Dec 22nd, 2008 by Irene Etzkorn

Deadly complexity

I complain about needless complexity in credit card agreements, telephone bills and government forms when it is a nuisance. Once in awhile, an example stops me in my tracks because it is much more serious. Reading the January, 2009 edition of Vanity Fair, I was horrified to read that unclear instructions had killed hundreds of people. On September 29, 2006, a Legacy 600 private jet caused an accident with a Boeing 737 in South America that killed everyone onboard the 737. I had heard about this accident in the news, but until I read the magazine article, I hadn’t realized that unclear instructions and an unwieldy computerized Flight Management System were the roots of the accident.

Two pilots were flying a new but “inherently simple jet that had been stuffed with electronic capabilities-most of them nested, and therefore hidden from immediate view.” As the Vanity Fair author points out, they were unable to answer the offhand question from a passenger who asked, “How much longer (to the destination)?” because the computer screen offered them:

“Duty time, Block time, Local time, Push time, Release time, Time Off, Time en Route, Time of Arrival, Fuel-Remaining Time, Void Time and Coordinated Universal time (aka Zulu time).”

Much more seriously-fatally for others-they had unknowingly turned off the TCAS transponder in mid-flight during their fumbling and searching. They had been flying on a collision course with the Boeing 737, yet they weren’t transmitting their position so that collision-avoidance systems on the ground and other aircraft could detect them.
(more…)

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tags: brand

Nov 17th, 2008 by Irene Etzkorn

There’s Gold in the Golden Rule

The quest for cost-cutting overrides common sense. When the phone company wants to take the customer service phone number off the bill because “It encourages people to call,” you know that efficiency and cost-cutting have gone too far.

Have corporate executives lost their minds? Now there is technology that monitors the tone of your voice as you respond to telephone prompts, and when it detects increased irritation it offers you a live person. If you are so certain that you are causing irritation, remove the irritant. Don’t wait until I’m ready to strangle myself with the phone cord.

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tags: healthcare