Put the time in the first line

The message from the dental clinic arrives the evening before the appointment, and it is nine lines long.

It covers the cancellation policy, the parking, a form to bring, a number to call that is not the number it came from, and somewhere in the middle, the time. A person reading it on a phone in a lift has to go through it twice to find out when to turn up.

Nobody hired the receptionist to write. Nobody hired the dentist to write either. They trained for teeth, and they are good at teeth. Writing feels like the small chore around the real job, the bit done quickly at the end of the day.

But that message is how every patient meets the clinic before the chair. If it confuses them, they arrive late, or anxious, or at the wrong door, and the dentist pays for it all morning. The writing was part of the job all along. Anyone whose work depends on other people understanding them is a writer, whether the title says so or not, and they are judged like one.

There used to be one way out of this: practise. Read the message aloud, cut it in half, put the time in the first line.

That still works. There is now a second way as well. When the words do not need anyone's personal voice, there are tools that will take a crowded paragraph and hand back a short, clear one in seconds.

Either way, the excuse has gone. The time goes in the first line, and the dentist goes back to teeth.