The five words that make someone close your post

I read a broker’s post last week that used the word ‘utilise’ twice in four sentences. Both times it could have been ‘use’. Nothing else about the post was wrong.

That’s the thing about this – the damage doesn’t announce itself. Nobody comments ‘I found that hard to read’. They just don’t finish it, and you never hear about the ones who didn’t finish.

The research that should worry our industry

There’s a body of work on something called processing fluency, and the finding is consistently uncomfortable.

Take a claim. Show it to one group in a clean font with good contrast and short sentences. Show the same claim to another group in a harder font with longer clauses. The second group rates it as less likely to be true.

Same claim. Same facts. Different confidence in it.

It isn’t rational and it doesn’t go away when people are told about it. The brain treats the ease of reading something as weak evidence for whether it’s true, because in most of life, things that are easy to understand are things we already know, and things we already know are usually true.

So every bit of friction in your writing costs you more than attention. It costs you credibility, which is a trade almost nobody realises they’re making.

The five words

I pulled these from a few hundred broker and adviser posts. They’re not the only offenders, but they’re the most common ones that cost you something.

‘Utilise’. Use. There has never been a sentence improved by ‘utilise’.

‘Facilitate’. Nobody has ever said this out loud in a conversation about a home loan. ‘I’ll sort it’ or ‘I’ll handle that’ does the same job and sounds like a person.

‘Solutions’. A lending solution is a loan. A finance solution is a loan. The word does nothing except add two syllables and remove a picture from the reader’s head.

‘Leverage’. As a verb, it means ‘use’ again. As a noun in finance it means something specific and useful, so this one’s worth keeping only when you actually mean gearing.

‘Journey’. The home loan journey. The property journey. Your financial journey. Everybody’s journey. The word got so common it stopped carrying anything.

The real test

Read your last post out loud.

Anywhere you stumble, trip over a clause, or have to go back to the start of a sentence – your reader did that first, and they didn’t go back. They scrolled.

Reading out loud catches more than any rule I could give you. It catches the sentence with three clauses in it. It catches the paragraph that should’ve been two. And it catches the bit where you wrote like someone’s compliance officer was watching, because you can hear it.

What this doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean writing like a children’s book, and it doesn’t mean dumbing anything down.

Plenty of complicated things get explained clearly every day. The difficulty of the idea and the difficulty of the sentence are separate problems, and most finance writing gets the second one wrong while being quite good at the first.

You can explain lenders mortgage insurance in plain words. You can explain how an offset works in plain words. The reason most people don’t isn’t that the concepts are hard – it’s that writing simply takes longer and feels less professional while you’re doing it.

The short version

• People rate easy-to-read claims as more likely to be true, which means hard writing costs you belief
• Utilise, facilitate, solutions, leverage and journey are the five doing the most work for the least return
• Read it out loud; every stumble is a reader you lost
• Simple sentences and complicated ideas can live together perfectly well

The clearest broker in your postcode isn’t the smartest one. They’re the one who went back and took a second pass.