Precision is not evasion

Clients are sometimes told that a carefully worded statement looks evasive. A statement that is exactly true and no wider than the facts is not evasion. It is the only kind that survives.

A client’s chief executive said to me recently, of a statement we had spent a day drafting, that it was so carefully worded that it would look evasive. He wanted something warmer, broader and more confident.

I understood the instinct. But the criticism confuses two different things. An evasive statement avoids the question. A precise statement answers exactly the question that was asked, and no wider one. The first is a failure of honesty; the second is the opposite.

Why breadth fails

Broad statements feel reassuring because they cover everything. That is precisely their weakness. A statement that a company “takes the privacy of everyone seriously” or “has always complied with every rule” is a claim about every case, and it can be disproved by one. When the one case appears, as it usually does, the broad statement is quoted beside it and the company is shown to have said something untrue.

A precise statement makes a narrower claim and can therefore be true in every word. It may not reassure as many people on the day. It will still be standing a year later.

Precision and honesty

Precision can, of course, be abused. A statement can be exactly true and still be designed to leave a false impression, by answering a narrower question than the one people are actually asking. Readers are good at detecting this, and regulators are better. The test is not whether each sentence is true, but whether a reasonable reader, knowing all the facts, would say the statement had told them the truth.

That test is harder to pass than the first. It is the one we apply.