Case study: RBS
Shorter and sweeter on the eyes
0 min read, tagged in Writing and in HR & internal comms.
RBS needed help rewriting their intranet system for their teams in Poland. Stuff like company benefits, maternity leave, guidance on pay and so on. They’d been translated over from their Polish originals and some of the meaning had come out a bit tangled. It was our job to unravel them, get them on tone and trim any repetition.
Less like The FT, more like a HP
It’s okay saying their writing’s improved, but it’s much better alongside some cold, hard numbers.
As part of your last-minute spell check in Word, you can tick a box to ask for a Flesh-Kincaid readability score (we’ve got a checker you can use, too). It’ll check how convoluted your words and sentences are and whether you’ve written too many passives. You get a score out of 100 – the higher the score the easier your writing is on the eye.
On average, the RBS originals were scoring a 56.1, which is a lot like reading The Financial Times. They’re now up at 79.6 and reading more like a Harry Potter. (Minus the wands and Quidditch, of course.)
And their word count’s down by ¼
Their originals were just over 8000 words. We whittled them down to just over 6000.
