“An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told,” said Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Richard III. How many times in the world of corporate communications is that instruction lost as a business finds itself complicating its messaging with overly complex language and/or an unclear view of what the message is the business wants to get out, either externally or internally?
This is one area where the use of AI is clouding the picture. When turning over the job of content creation to ChatGPT and its like-minded associates, the results can be overly flowery or verbose and the messaging gets lost.
Good writing starts in the thinking
A well-used argument for using AI is for it to put together an initial draft of a communication, which can then be edited by a human into something that a human might have written and that a human might want to read. But a pitfall of using AI in this way is that it’s often the process of drafting from a blank sheet of paper that helps the writer to hone the message and distil some real clarity and purpose into what they want to say.
If the initial ‘thinking’ stage is outsourced to AI, however, clarity can be lost. Presented with an initial draft by AI, the all-too-human temptation, particularly if time is tight, is to keep the structure and tinker at the seams even if the messaging is perhaps not quite right.
Know what you want to say
Of course, we can’t always blame AI. Sometimes the business itself is just not clear about what it wants to communicate and why, which leads to communications that can be opaque or overly complex because the writer is not certain about what the outcome should be and what message they want the recipient to receive.
Don’t overcomplicate
‘Plainly told’ is not an instruction to be dull either; the very best and most effective communications don’t need to hide behind flowery and wordy language; the brilliance is in the simplicity. And if it can’t be plainly told, perhaps, as Shakespeare’s Queen Elizabeth might have thought, the tale is just not honest enough…