Technical documentation specialist

The Cost of Poor Writing in Australia?
About AU$15 billion each year!

Many employees in Australia are likely to spend at least 15 minutes each working day wrestling with poor writing in the workplace. This is the time taken to:

• work out what is meant in vague or imprecise emails, memos, reports etc.
• send emails or make phone calls seeking clarification
• wade through convoluted, verbose and redundant writing and
• backtrack to correct mistakes resulting from misunderstanding.

Fifteen minutes might not sound much, but it equates to about 3% of an employee's paid time.

As at May 2025, the average annual salary of full-time employees in Australia was $104,520. Three per cent equates to $3,135 per employee per year wasted in trying to decipher poor writing and wade through unnecessary verbiage.

What is your company wasting each year?

Take the number of your full-time employees who must work with words in their day-to-day job and multiply that figure by $3135. For example, if you have 100 such employees, the productivity wasted due to poor writing is likely to be at least $313,560. Each year!

Try our waste calculator at the right. Just enter how many employees you have, modify the average annual salary if necessary, and press or tap Enter.

NOTE: This figure doesn't take into account the reputational cost to your brand resulting from the adverse impression customers form from poorly written messaging.

What could you do?

1. Engage a professional writer for your technical, policy and instructional materials.
2. Engage a professional editor to ensure that the official writing your company produces is easily understood and unlikely to cause reputational damage.

This is where Abelard Consulting can help.

What is Australia wasting per year?

In July 2025 there were approximately 14.7 million full-time employees in Australia. If a third of these employees wasted 15 minutes each day trying to tease meaning out of poorly worded documents, the waste is a staggering $15 billion … each year.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics