write clearly! it’s not your mission to confuse and bedazzle!
Posted on 01 February 2010
There’s a bee in my bonnet. Its buzzing grows louder with every stilted email full of unnecessary jargon and poor grammar. It ricochets wildly with every corporate cliché and meaningless acronym. There’s a mud shoveling effort afoot in business writing and the waters grow murkier by the day.
Why seemingly sensible human beings will speak in plain English on the telephone then drop synergy-bombs and litter “leverages” throughout their writing baffles me. Is it to impress your audience with your in-crowd vocabulary? Through confusion, do you hope to impress and awe? I’ve always thought that effective writing means getting your point across clearly with a voice and tone that suit the situation.
Whilst I don’t claim to be a terrific writer, here are just a few things that I avoid like the plague when creating an email.
- Using an unnecessarily long word when a short one gets the same point across:
- ascertain instead of find out
- undertake instead of do or agree to
- numerous instead of many
- Replacing an easily explained concept with an undefined acronym:
- PMO instead of “our current approach” or “what we do now”
- FMO instead of “a new approach” or “what we will do in future”
- Not only using a business-wank word, but misusing it! I’ve already whinged about leveraging instead of using but damn that pisses me off.
- Liberal application of clichés:
- Best in breed
- Low-hanging fruit
- Drill down
- Cascading information
- Moving forward
- Touch base about that offline
- In this space
- The list goes on…
I’m afraid I’m fighting a losing battle. Does anyone feel like adding to my collection of writing sins?
5 responses to write clearly! it’s not your mission to confuse and bedazzle!
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I realised upon reading this a few times that I’d made a couple of typos. There was even a sentence featuring a disagreement of tenses! So that’s another thing I’d like to add to my list of writing sins – not proofreading for obvious grammatical and spelling errors. Hrmph.
Nice work Cam. I agree that it is important to get our ducks in a row, and keep in the loop on these points – then we can talk shop. There’s a need to move the goalpoasts, and nail this to the wall. I mean we are here at the coalface, no need to look at the horizon. We can just pan this out a bit.
It’s a no brainer really. No great learning curve. Its really just a meet and greet, to put faces to names. After this to put it in layman’s terms, we’ll start ramping up and get out from under the rock. …
If we have a target, we can streamline the troops as a stepping stone. From our perspective, there are no showstoppers right now, but if they come back and verbalise that they’ve fallen out of love with the value chain, we’ll need to take that on board and think outside the box. Perhaps even wipe the slate clean. I mean, this is not really set in stone. There may be some slippage. If its necessary for them to tick the box, then we can certainly strike a balance. Just so that we can see the wood for the trees here, I see this as your baby – I want to take a back seat here. The ball is in your court. I can certainly see some synergies from our previous dealings. Its not like I am going to be taking a scatter gun approach right now. In terms of value add, we are sitting pretty.
We need a champion to get leverage out of the synergies that were created in streamlining the process and building head-room in this space. Perhaps you can populate a table so that we can get some buy in on this one and we can all own the project and be on the same page?
If you need more traction send me a memo and I will unpack it and cascade it to the team. Then we can take this one offline.
Sweet jesus, that’s amazing. I feel violated.
Well done!
But big unnecessary words are fun! They make you sound like you know what you’re talking about or at least that you’re pretending to know what you’re talking about. It’ll be a bluff that no one dare call because when they in turn use the same phrases, they expect that you also nod and acknowledge their elite-ness.
Here’s a list of buzz words I compiled in a 6 month period, when new to the game:
Cheap and nasty
Cheap and cheerful
Wearing that Lens
Putting on a different hat
Taken on this journey to get where it needs to be
Bare bones
All singing all dancing
Bells and whistles
Have those conversations
Core Capabilities
New World
Throw technology at it
Value Add
Pain points
Story we need to paint
High performance team
Seeing if there is a better story here
2 stories at play here
Talk Shop
First cab off the rank
Don’t fail me now
No free Headspace for this
Computing Power on demand:
Software as a Service: Applications delivered over the internet
Platform as a service: Application development and provisioning delivered over the internet
Boil the ocean / Cook the ocean
Brown bag
Hot to trot
Downloads
Blue Sky
Point of Presence
Presence of mind
Hell for leather
Rob Peter to pay Paul
Call it out
Throw away
All that goodness
Not going to set the world on fire | Set the world on fire
Pieces that start to build it out
They’re all coming in quick now
Socialise
Lynch Pin
Before my time
Face sell time
Walk the floor
Fireside chat
Press the flesh
Dog’s Breakfast
The idea has legs to it
Best Endeavours
Burning Platforms
On the front foot
Tipping point
Eureka Moment
“The Challenge is…”
Low hanging fruit
Crest fallen
Strike whilst the iron is hot
Flavour
Break the boundaries
Cap in hand
Humble pie
A more meaningful dialogue
Ring fence around it
Conscious of time
Capture hearts and minds..
Silver bullet
Cliff Notes
Those are brilliant! So much so that Wordpress decided the list was spam!
I’m particularly enamoured of “not enough headspace for this.”