Communication plays a key role in the sales, marketing, and HR of every company. We use texts to reach new customers, partners, and talents. The language we use falls short early on - and that is a problem. Technology offers an answer.
From elementary school, we are all taught to write in the same way. A teacher asks for periods and commas, so we work with periods and commas. We write our first cover letters or business plans in a style that aligns as closely as possible with the image we have of an employer or funder.
Then we work in a professional field, learn about new company cultures, and choose between informal and formal greetings. If a customer does not speak Dutch, you do not email in Dutch. And when reporting on an important result, you write punctually.
Although it is quite possible that you occasionally peek at online language advice or a dictionary, most choices remain unconscious. Language development occurs automatically. We learn from day one to communicate, with appreciation and understanding from our immediate environment as the goal. Language use is tailored to the needs of family, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Often, the environment shares a similar background and culture. We are conditioned by our surroundings. Our communicative ability may be limited or just as diverse as the people from whom we learn.
Language & the search for talent
If we rely entirely on our basic development when writing a job advertisement, we miss a huge pool of talent. Words and sentences will find little or no connection with candidates from a different cultural background. The same applies to customer recruitment. Some linguists and communication experts devote their entire working lives to tailoring language use. Collaborating with such professionals offers the opportunity to have important texts checked and improved. The downside is that almost every external expression is important, which drives up costs.
Communicative ability is a product of your environment. If you broaden that environment with a course or study, you write more effectively. Required time and money remain a disadvantage. Moreover, as an employer, you are rarely the center of all external business communication. Knowledge transfer is conditional and time-intensive, even in the long term.
A solution for writing diverse and inclusive texts is the use of technology. The advent of PCs introduced digital dictionaries, word processing, and spell checks. We now live in a world where articles are written by AI algorithms.
The development of 'Natural Language Processing' (NLP) makes this possible. The term refers to a field where linguistics and IT come together. The resulting technology led, among other things, to the mass introduction of spell check in Microsoft's Office 97. NLP can now be used by developers to produce grammatically, vocabulary-wise, and structurally correct texts.
One of those developers is Textmetrics. The company from Arnhem has developed a digital platform: an AI writing assistant that you can use to improve all your texts. Textmetrics points out sentence length and provides synonyms that resonate better. The workflow is similar to collaborating with a linguist, but without the costs of a linguist. You write or copy a text into the software, after which you receive feedback for improving readability and effectiveness.
Since the readability of a text depends on the personality and background of a reader, you fill in the language level or gender of your target audience. An image of your target audience is conditional for the right choice. If you hope to reach a highly educated, Dutch-speaking reader, then language levels C1 and C2 are good options. A language level like A1 is suitable for readers with minimal understanding of Dutch.
The feedback from Textmetrics' writing assistant takes the choice into account. The advice to split sentences will occur more regularly at levels like A1 or A2 than at levels like C1 and C2. A relatively long sentence is, after all, more disadvantageous for A1 or A2 level readers than for C1 or C2 level readers. Gender is equally important. After entering or writing a text, you choose between 'Male', 'Female', or 'Neutral'. The synonyms that Textmetrics suggests are tailored to the selection.
Praise
Writing style is just one part of Textmetrics' whole. The platform simultaneously checks for SEO optimization and brings a huge amount of marketing expertise to the table. Consistent use directly translates into better-scoring web pages. The necessity of a marketer does not disappear, but is supplemented. The same applies to the grammatical component. A quick and manageable overview of improvement points will also help the most experienced marketers or writers. Checks from colleagues become less necessary, and independence is increased.
We use the software ourselves. Our experience is worldly. In any other case, we would not have had the courage to recommend the platform with such directness. Visit the website, thank us later.
More info: textmetrics.com
