Small hassles and extra steps can sharply reduce action.
More quotes“We are delighted to announce the implementation of our enhanced customer-centric service proposition.”
The writer reads it aloud and runs out of breath near “implementation”.
Second attempt. “Customer-centric” sounds peculiar when addressed to an actual customer.
Third attempt: “We’ve changed the service. You can now book by phone as well as online.”
No grammar checker was required. The mouth objected before the writer could defend the sentence with brand guidelines.
Silent reading is unusually forgiving when we wrote the words ourselves. We know which noun matters, where to pause and who performed the action. A new reader has none of that private information. Spoken aloud, repetition becomes obvious, buried verbs arrive late and a clause that looked sophisticated needs emergency oxygen.
The stumble also locates the repair. Sometimes one sentence needs splitting. Sometimes the writer cannot say it cleanly because two different claims have been bundled together and neither has been decided.
This is not an instruction to make every contract sound like pub chat. Technical language can be exact and formal. It still reaches the reader in sequence. If a condition appears five lines after its consequence, hearing the sentence may expose the problem.
The colleague in the next chair reads the revision once. They pause at “enhanced”, delete it and check the phone number. The message goes out at 15:42.