The cost of bad business writing

Poor communication may doing your organisation more damage than you realise. Can you afford the unseen cost of bad business writing?

Reading time: 3 minutes | By Lee Ellwood

Does it really matter if a workplace document doesn't do what it's meant to do? Yes ‒ and for more reasons than you might expect. Unclear writing that doesn’t engage readers costs time, money, trust and impact, often before anyone outside the organisation sees it.

Writing is how things get done in an organisation of any size. So when the writing doesn’t work, neither does the business behind it.

The internal cost to your organisation

Your organisation pays for ineffective business writing long before a client, stakeholder or funder sees it: in inefficiency. When guidelines and directions are unclear, staff waste time trying to decipher them. Tasks take longer than they need to, and completed work gets redone. Meetings run over while people untangle the paperwork.

Every misunderstanding costs time that wasn’t in the budget. Your productivity is down. And in inefficient, opaque work environments, staff morale drops quickly.

Sometimes the cost of bad business writing is more direct. Unclear information leads to real mistakes: incorrect orders, inaccurate client records or bad decisions based on an unclear brief. Errors cost money to fix.

... and the external cost

Possibly more damaging, those errors directly affect clients and stakeholders. That costs you in reputational damage and broken trust — invaluable assets you’ve built up over time. And the damage can take even longer to repair.

Your organisation also pays in missed opportunities. We all handle so much information every day, and poor writing makes it easy to choose what not to read. When your writing doesn’t do its job, your impact stalls.

• When stakeholders don't read the reports you send them, your achievements aren’t recognised.
• Policymakers miss your recommendations, so your impact is limited.
• If the public doesn't connect with your campaigns, they don’t engage with your mission.
• Funders can’t see your value or your capability when your application doesn’t clearly show them.

If you’re in a social impact, government, research or community organisation, this cost can hit you particularly hard. Your work often depends on convincing people who don't have to say ‘yes’: a funder choosing between your proposal and someone else's. A policymaker deciding which recommendations make it into a decision. A community member deciding whether to trust a service they don’t know.

Poor writing can leave your readers thinking that if you can’t explain yourself clearly, you might not have your act together either.

Bad business writing is an organisational risk

That’s why poor writing is more than a little quality problem. It’s actually an organisational risk: to your brand, your reputation, your hard-won trust and your potential to change people’s lives.

• A report that goes unread is a missed opportunity to shape a decision.
• A grant application that doesn't succeed is money not raised for work that matters.
• A set of instructions that gets misread is an error that damages your reputation and trust.

Each of those examples traces back to a document that didn't do its job ‒ and each one has consequences beyond the page.

Writing as a strategic tool

Good writing does more than describe your work or move it along: it’s the doorway between what you do and the people who need to see it. Once you start seeing writing that way, you can use it to its full potential.

Many organisations act to fix clearly visible problems, like inefficient processes, an underperforming program or IT that’s slowing everyone down. Writing rarely gets the same attention, yet it carries your reporting, your public voice, your internal instructions, your funding bids, your case for support.

Can you really afford not to see good writing as a strategic asset ‒ and invest in it accordingly?

---

We use and recommend the Australian Government Style Manual as a guide to good writing principles of clarity, consistency, accessibility and inclusivity.