Under TUPE Regulations, your current employer must transfer your employed status to us so that we can record it on your Employee Starter Form. If we do not receive this transfer, we record your Continuous Employment as the date that appears on your Employee Starter Form.
46 words; two sentences
Notice how the short sentences and verbs in the second version make the text easier to understand.
The personal words, ‘we’ and ‘your’ make the text more welcoming and human, rather than bureaucratic and threatening.
We also removed the negatives (‘no period’ and ‘unless’) as negatives make sentence more difficult to untangle. Look at the following for another, longer example.
The original copy for a cat worming treatment:
When cats are treated with antibiotics, such as doxycycline, they are unlikely to be completely cleared of the organism; however, they may well become PCR negative. If the diagnosis had not been made prior to initiating therapy, unless the cat does not seem to be responding, it is not helpful to perform PCR testing as a negative result does not rule out the possibility of the cat developing carrier status.
Our version:
After treatment with antibiotics such as doxycycline, the cat may still be a carrier: the treatment rarely clears the organism completely and a negative PCR result could be caused by the treatment itself.
Please see our associate company’s guide to a plain English style (www.thewriteway.co.uk/freestyleguide and their pages on plain English (www.thewriteway.co.uk/plain.htm). |
