Tis a Gift to Be Simple, but Does It Sound Official Enough?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing to make "plain English" standard in legal documents. The first companies volunteering compliance with the agency's wishes were Bell Atlantic Corp. and Nynex Corp., which simplified the language used in a prospectus detailing their merger.

Here is an example of the change:

Before: "No person has been authorized to give any information or make any representation other than those contained or incorporated by reference in this Joint Proxy Statement/Prospectus, and, if given or made, such information or representation must not be relied upon as having been authorized."

After: "We have not authorized anyone to provide you with information that is different from what is contained in this Joint Proxy Statement/Prospectus."

Banking industry observers said their approach to technology could benefit from similar treatment. But people who craft documents in that area also contend that linguistic standards have evolved with the systems: If a press release or brochure sounds less formal and complicated than executives think it should, it doesn't cut the mustard.

It's not that executives are incapable of describing their technologies in common, succinct terminology. The corporate culture discourages them.

Pat Ancipink of the Stephenson Group, a New Jersey-based public relations firm with an emphasis on technology, explained the process of writing a press release this way: "I talk to a number of people within the company, then I do the draft of the release, and then it gets bounced back and forth.

"What tends to happen in the interests of the release is that more technical information tends to get included but put on a less conversational level."

She said the degree of nitty-gritty depends on the type of document. For a new-product release, "you have to get all the technical details in, and for trademark protection you have to use full product names."

This is less true when describing ways clients might find a product valuable, Ms. Anicpink said. "In a case-history type of story, you can get more into how the product is used."

Ms. Ancipink worked with Emily Bumann of Network Controls International on the announcement headlined, "NCI to Offer Integrated Retail Delivery Channels in Server-Centric Architecture."

Ms. Bumann, a marketing executive at the Charlotte, N.C., company, had no problem offering an oral translation: "We have a new product called NCI Bank Manager that integrates all the information about a customer into one system."

In another example of prolixity, Elo Touchsystems of Fremont, Calif., claimed its Internet software "offers kiosk designers features that simplify touch programming and provide easy customization of function buttons for activation by finger or stylus. Access can be limited to specific sites. A virtual touch keyboard simplifies data entry."

Does this mean that it works at the touch of a button? Yes, said Mike Lewis, Elo's product line manager. "You're going to have large buttons in your application, so people would go up to the kiosk and say, "Okay, I have to touch here'."

Sometimes it is more difficult to shed light on what a technology is and does. Consider this claim by two California-based companies: "Boole & Babbage awarded Amdahl certification of Mainview products for parallel sysplex management."

Four publicists - one internal and one external at each company - deferred the task of translating, each vowing to find someone better qualified.

Finally, Mike Bunyard, senior director of product marketing for Boole & Babbage in San Jose, said: "Basically, we've tested the Mainview product line on the new Amdahl Millennium-type processors running in a parallel sysplex environment. Parallel sysplex is basically a way of hooking together several CPUs - or machines - to run in parallel with each other and distribute workloads."

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