Business Insight Zone

Clear language and clear thought go together.

This argument has been made many times (most notably by a certain Mr. Orwell), so I won’t belabor the principle. But I will offer this one practical tip on making your language clearer:

When you’re writing, the “Find” function is your friend.

This morning I was working on a long document and I found myself reaching for the word “circuitously.” Not a bad word, not overly fancy, and the right word for the sentence it was in . . . but a bad word to overuse, because it’s the kind of 30-cent word that will clang in the reader’s ear on the second go-round. I thought I might have used it somewhere else in the document, but the thing is over a hundred pages long, and I’ve been making lots of changes throughout those pages.

Fortunately, in this age of word-processing, the solution is trivial: a few seconds with the Ctrl-F function saved me from using a plethora of “circuitously”s. (The search feature on this blog reveals zero uses of “plethora,” so maybe I’m safe with that one.)

Attention, Marketers!

Now, take this a step further and check out the list of business jargon (and the related links) on this page, and especially the chart of marketing jargon on this page.

My challenge to you is to use the “Find” function to root out all of these words across all of your marketing materials. Just get rid of them. Although many of these words once carried a noble amount of freight in a good sentence, they’ve been so overused in marketing-speak that they’ve all broken down. Your readers can’t even hear these words anymore — or, if they hear them, they can’t help but roll their eyes at them.

So, please, constrain yourselves from using these words. Find fresh avenues of expression. It all starts with [Ctrl]-F.

What’s YOUR most annoying marketing buzzword?

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(A personal coda: when I came to Hoover’s eight years ago, the house style — which adamantly opposes jargon — made sense to me right away. Though I’m a wordy cuss when I’m talking out loud, and though I’ve been known to reach for 10-dollar words sometimes, I benefited from a string of good writing teachers in high school and college who drilled the tendency for jargon out of me. When I got here, I felt right at home.)

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Further reading:

• Raven’s Brain: Decipher and/or Generate Business Jargon
• David Meerman Scott at MarketingProfs: Cutting-Edge, Mission-Critical Analysis: Steps to Avoiding Overused Gobbledygook
• Yours truly: Memo to American Airlines: Watch your language!
• From Karl Geiger of USC: a business buzzword bingo card generator
  

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