Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

When it comes to government documents, shorter is better almost all the time.

I used to write government documents. I still read government documents. Such is the life of someone who worked for the government, retired, and went to work for companies that compete for government contracts.

Here is it, something regarding government documents that is true practically, not quite absolutely, all the time:

Shorter documents are better.

There are many reasons. Here are two:

1. Fewer words means fewer mistakes
2. Shorter documents leads to more attentive reading

Item 1. – a friend of mine has an expression, “- diarrhea of the mouth.” That is his way of saying that some people say too many words. In this case, they write too many words. There is some math or statistics property at work here. x out of 1,000 words is a mistake. If you write 1,000 words, there will be x mistakes. If you write 5,000 words, there will be 5x mistakes. A simple ideas, I know, but it seems to hold true.

Item 2. – People who read government documents, allocate a set amount of time to each document. There is, after all, a set amount of time in a day. Documents with fewer pages mean more time is spent reading each page.

When are longer government documents better than shorter ones? I don’t know. I hedge here because nothing is true 100% of the time, except this last statement.