This particular extract – slightly altered for the sake of confidentiality – comes from the text of a speech we worked on with a client. We always write with our clients – not simply for them – and when we worked on this particular passage together it became clear that our client was in danger of hiding his light under a bushel.

The purpose of his speech was to impress and persuade his audience; and this passage offered us an opportunity that was too good to miss. You were right when you wrote that the original talks “about intention, not achievement”, and our aim was to underline what the Code of Practice had accomplished – and the major part that our client had played in initiating and developing it.

The orginal “I…worked closely with the Department for Work and Pensions to develop a Code of Practice” is rather more modest that your “I developed a code [sic] of Practice.” More importantly, you’ve changed “to close off” to “that put an end to”. By including the word “that” you are suggesting that the discrimination and exploitation has stopped. The original doesn’t say that – it is talking about an intention, not an achievement.

Maybe you could take some more “deadwood” out – you don’t really need “disreputable” if we already say the agencies are discriminating and exploiting. It’s also not really necessary to bring in another verb to explain that the domestic workers are from abroad; “foreign domestic workers” is a common phrase that might do instead.

You suggest “stop”, and it is a much more resonant idea than “put an end to”, so why not use that. And why not use powerful verbs like “exploiting” instead of abstract nouns like “exploitation”? This connects the exploiters with their verb, as you have done with the “I” and the “developed”.

So maybe we get something like this:

“Working with the Department for Work and Pensions, I developed a Code of Practice to stop agencies and employers exploiting and discriminating against foreign domestic workers.”

This also reduces the word count further, to 26.

Interestingly, by changing the abstract nouns to verbs, we expose a question about who is doing the exploiting. I have made a guess that it is the employers and agencies. If it isn’t, we should say who it is, or at least take the employers and agencies out of the picture, with something like: “to stop people exploiting and discriminating against foreign domestic workers”.

Many of my clients (especially those in the high-tech arena) seem to think that clarifying their material by selecting the most pertinent information (and leaving the rest out or passing it along in another medium) will make them appear dishonest or uninformed. One engineer actually claimed that presenting so much information that it confused his audience was a positive sign: “It shows how complicated the issue is.” (I think he also felt it showed how smart he was.)

Some material is so complex and detailed that it can best be communicated in writing — in reports, spread sheets, and the like. The oral presentation can then help people understand the information and its implications.

You can communicate a vast amount of information in a presentation, especially if you follow @sal’s advice and take pains to avoid speaking as you write.

Whether the information has anything at all to do with with your message is another matter.

Cheers,
Martin

I do agree that talking as if you were writing is ineffectual.

The key is to structure the message to give the information in a comprehensible way.

An important step is to use simple language, and I would always recommend “The Complete Plain Words” by Sir Ernest Gowers.

But this should be after much thought has gone into thinking about structure and order, building the ideas and perhaps weaving it into a story.

The problem is we’ve forgotten how to concentrate and the trick is to keep your audience engaged and attentive. Stories and rhetoric will certainly do that.