Writing for doctors, lawyers and CAs, without the pamphlet.

Open the website of a chartered accountancy firm in Ahmedabad. Audit and assurance. Direct taxation. Indirect taxation. Company law matters. Advisory. Fifteen headings, each followed by a paragraph that restates the heading in longer words. The clinic's site does the same with procedures, and the law chamber's with practice areas. Every line is accurate. None of them tells the reader whether to pick up the phone.

Read your rules first

Doctors, advocates and CAs each answer to a professional body with rules on what they may say in public about their own work, and some of those rules are strict. Read yours, or ask the partner who has, before anyone writes a line. This piece is about how to write inside them.

In practice the rules and good writing pull the same way. No boasts, no promised results, no comparisons with the practice down the road. The copy that survives all of that is the copy that explains, and explaining is what these pages are worst at.

The reader is worried

Nobody reads a CA's website for pleasure. They read it because a notice arrived, or because the business grew and someone at a family wedding said they now need an audit. The person on a dental clinic's page has a toothache and a fear of the chair. The person looking for a lawyer has a problem they haven't told anyone about yet.

That changes the job. A list of services answers a question the reader didn't ask. What they want to know is simpler:

• Do you deal with my thing? In their words, on the first screen.
• What happens next? The first call, the first visit, the documents to bring, roughly what it costs.
• Will you make me feel stupid? The tone of the page answers this before any sentence does.

Name the problem the way the client says it

Professionals write in the words of their exams. Clients search in the words of their trouble. “Representation before tax authorities” is what the firm does. “Got an income tax notice” is what the client types at eleven at night. “Endodontic treatment” is the procedure. “Root canal, does it hurt” is the question.

Keep the correct term, because some readers search for it and because it shows you know it. Put it second. Lead with the reader's version: “Got a notice from the Income Tax department? We read it with you, tell you what it actually asks for, and reply on your behalf.” The proper heading can sit underneath, where the other professionals will look for it.

Explain one thing completely

The leaflet's instinct is to mention everything and explain nothing, in case explaining gives the work away. It works the other way round. For SELEQT Wealth we wrote a post for doctors that explains a nominee is not an heir, names the 2015 insurance exception, and ends by asking whether the reader knows who is nominated on their PF account. It held nothing back for a call.

Teach one thing completely, on the page, for free. The reader who learned it from you knows whom to ask about the next one.

A CA firm can do this with the documents a bank asks for on a home loan. A clinic can do it with what happens at a first visit, from the waiting room to the bill. Pick the question you answer on the phone most often and answer it in writing, all of it. Our piece on writing an FAQ page has the method for collecting those questions.

Credentials go in one line

The degrees, the memberships, the years since enrolment, the visiting fellowship abroad. They matter, and the reader will check them, once they have decided you might be the right person. Lead with them and the page reads as a CV. Put them under the name, in one line, and let the paragraphs above do the persuading.

One sentence about how you work often does more than letters after a name. “We reply to every client mail the same working day.” “The doctor you book is the doctor you see.” Only if it is true, and only if you will still be doing it in a year.

Write the way you talk across the desk

Most good doctors and CAs explain things clearly to a nervous person sitting opposite them. Then they write a website and turn into a textbook. “Periodontal disease” becomes “gums that bleed when you brush” the moment a patient is in the room. Write the room version.

Short sentences. The plain word, with the technical one in brackets if it helps. An example from the reader's life rather than the syllabus. And leave out the words every practice uses, the “leading” and the “comprehensive”, along with the nine words that make every brand sound like the one next door.

Do this with your Services page

Open it. Above each heading, write the sentence a client would use to describe that problem. Pick the one question you answer most on the phone and write the full answer under it. Move the degrees to a single line under your name. Then read the page as the person who got the notice this morning. If they know by the end whether to call you, it is done.