Hey, it's Pam

This week I'm looking at a writing habit that quietly adds weight to every document your team produces. It sounds formal. It feels safe. But it's slowing your readers down and stretching review cycles longer than they need to be.

Got a writing pattern that drives you crazy during reviews? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and they help shape what I cover next.

In this issue:

• Stop turning verbs into furniture
• The Genzyme warning letter: what documentation failure looks like
• Copy makeover: one bloated procedure line, rewritten

Here's one I see in almost every regulated document I review. Writers turn perfectly good verbs into abstract nouns. "Conduct an investigation" instead of "investigate." "Facilitate the implementation of" instead of "implement." "Perform verification of" instead of "verify."

These are called nominalizations, and they're everywhere in technical writing. They add syllables, remove urgency, and bury the action inside a noun. In regulated documents, they also make it harder to tell who did what and when. They add too much weight to your writing.

The fix is simple. Scan your draft for phrases like "perform the [noun] of" or "conduct the [noun] of." If there's a verb hiding inside that noun, let the verb carry the sentence.

• Before: "The analyst performed verification of the sample results."
• After: "The analyst verified the sample results."

Shorter. Clearer. Faster to review.

This week, the FDA released a warning letter to Sanofi's Genzyme facility in Waterford, Ireland. The findings: quality control staff used uncontrolled checklists to review lab records, then discarded them. Some updates to lab records couldn't be traced to a specific person. And multiple deviations were canceled without a formal investigation.

Every one of those findings is a documentation issue. The science wasn't the problem. The writing and recordkeeping were.

That's what our PROS Readability Risk Assessment is built for: uncover the systemic documentation habits that create risk and fix them.

• Each issue, we create a sample of regulated-industry writing and show how a few changes make it clearer.

   

  Original

  Following verification of material integrity, the operator should proceed with initiation of the transfer sequence in accordance with applicable procedures. Documentation of the transfer must include confirmation that all pre-transfer checks were completed satisfactorily.

   

  Rewrite

  After verifying material integrity, the operator initiates the transfer sequence per SOP-XXX. The operator documents that all pre-transfer checks passed.

   

  Why it works

  The original packs four nominalizations into two sentences: "verification," "initiation," "accordance," and "confirmation." Each one turns a concrete action into an abstract noun. The rewrite swaps them for active verbs ("verifying," "initiates," "documents"), names the actor in both sentences, adds a real SOP reference so the reader knows where to look, and cuts the word count by more than a third. Fewer words, clearer ownership, faster review.