Bad writing is expensive. It can have direct operational costs: In 1983, Coleco lost $35 million in just a few months when customers returned thousands of new Coleco Adam home computers because they couldn’t understand the manual.

But mostly bad writing is a leaky bucket. Money just drips out in lost opportunities. I think people know this intuitively. When I talk to them, most people admit that they’re not happy with their website or that they’d like more compelling product literature or case studies. This is how we make a living at Articulate Marketing, so I know there is some demand out there!

To understand the cost of bad writing, I think we have to go back to why we write anything in the first place. In business we’re not really bothered about artistic expression or entertainment. What we want is to persuade and inform people.

Writing fails if the reader doesn’t understand it, doesn’t believe it or doesn’t remember it or act on it. Consequently, comprehension, credibility and retention are the requirements of business writing.

To help calculate the cost of bad writing, imagine you had a tool that could tell you how successful a piece of writing was at meeting these requirements. The opposite of a bullshit detector. (A good shit detector, perhaps?) It would tell you how readable it was. Think of readability as the ‘clickthrough’ rate for writing.

Companies spend lots of money chasing circulation: the number of hits on a website, the number of press releases sent out, the number of brochures printed. Little or no thought is given to readability.

But if your readability detector told you that a brochure was just 50% readable, you would know that half your production costs for making that brochure had been wasted. Also you would know that half the sales you hoped for as a result of the brochure had disappeared in a puff of incomprehension and indifference.

This is why even modest improvements in readability can generate a massive and disproportionate return. This is how some schlub of a writer can spoil a whole campaign in an afternoon.