Clarity of Information

Documents, of any type, must be as clear in meaning as possible. The purpose of a document is to convey information to the reader and if the reader is confused by what is written, the document has not served its purpose. This holds true for academic work or documents written for business reasons.

A document that is unclear could have dramatic consequences. For example:

A worker could misunderstand safety procedures and be injured as a result.
A sponsorship proposal may be unclear as to obligations and responsibilities of parties, and as a result lead to legal action.
A letter to a customer is poorly written and upsets the customer who moves their account to a competitor.
An event management plan provides confusing information and a critically important part of the plan is not done. The event is a complete failure.

Writing workplace/business documents is not like writing school essays. Every sentence has to be very carefully written and often re-written. Then the document needs to be proofread and someone other than the author needs to go through, sentence by sentence, and look for any language or sentence construction that may be ambiguous or unclear.

Clarity of information is one reason why pronouns (we, you, they, it) are not used in business documents. For example, parties to a lease contract are named continually as either the "lessor" or the "lessee" and not "us" and "you". A document that discusses safety procedures will refer to particular procedures by a name "shut-down" procedure or "wash up" procedures and never simply refer to the procedure as "it".

The writer of a workplace/business documents must not take anything for granted and should take steps to ensure that what is written is as clear as possible.