In my last post I covered how a professional proofreading covers the aspects of style, cohesion, and grammar in a work of any size. There is one other aspect that I failed to mention that definitely does deserve a mention: clarity. Translators and, to a lesser extent, editors can easily get lost in the content, in assuring that everything is presented correctly, that the message itself is difficult for readers to decipher.
The importance is quite simple: a lack of clarity in any work will make readers uninterested and spur them to stop reading in the middle. Whether you are selling a service or describing an important process, compositions are produced to be read, not to be read halfway through.
Being able to express yourself clearly is not a skill that can be learned easily. It requires a person to think abstractly and place himself in the shoes of others. The base knowledge that is assumed in the reader is next-to-zero; regardless of where this document occurs in a company’s timeline, there should be an absolute minimum of specificity and relying on information that was disclosed in previous internal documents.
