WORD SIMPLE

Recognize our headline? 

We (ahem!) borrowed it from a well-known tech company’s marketing campaign.

After all, the same sort of principles apply when talking simplification, whether in work or in words.  At least, we think so.  Route out the extraneous and the unnecessary (according to customers and users) and streamline, right?

Not.  So.  Fast.

Ownership of words within corporations tends to be (pick one) 1) mandated by the brand, 2) dominated by corporate functions like marketing and HR, 3) supervised by leaders, and/or 4) required by message stewards.  When interminably long documents and three-paragraph sentences dominate, it’s clear that someone isn’t paying attention to the eight-second rule.

Which is now the length of our attention span.

There are all sorts of reasons why business text is so hard to understand.  Like these:

“Defensive compliance” (consider annual reports and 10Ks)

“Bureaucratic tradition” (think government forms, even do-it-yourself instructions)

“Mindblindness” (the term psychologists use when folks are numb to their own knowledge).

What we know for sure is that someone (perhaps the author, maybe not) isn’t checking with his/her prospective readers, calibrating reactions, answering questions, and ensuring that at least a handful of audience members understand the points.  And when the average 10K in 2013 accounted for 42,000 words, someone, somewhere just didn’t want to be understood.

Mark Twain had us at this:  “I would have written that shorter, but I didn’t have the time.”  [Or was it Blaise Pascal?]

BUY THE BOOK ...

The casual era of business may soon be gone.

[Except, of course, for Silicon Valley.]

Suit jackets are the new ‘hoodie.’  Remote workers are being asked to spend at least one or two days in the office.  Face to face conversations are gradually replacing texting … and smartphone emails.

One thing that isn’t changing (and one we believe should change):  Overly formal, non-conversational, stiff writing.

How to recognize it?  It won’t sound like a real person.  It quietly screams ‘I’m self-conscious about what I say.”  And it relies on our favorite consultant-ese to communicate.  [Let’s vote out phrases and words like ‘best practices,’ ‘leverage,’ even ‘iconic.’  See our previous writings on those subjects.]

Understand, please:  We’re not advocating the loose lips kind of communication, where texting reigns and periods are invisible.  Or the type that insists on using abbreviations and emoji for delicate topics.  Buttoning up way-too-informal dialogue is okay by us.

What we are promoting is communication that is clear and reflects how people talk, write, and interact.  A narrative that tells a story, in language accessible to everyone.  A document that sells, yet sticks to the facts.  Video that is simple, compelling, and causes us to do or believe something. 

Seriously.  Is that harder than we think?

SAY IT AIN'T SO [with not-so-abject apologies]

Sometimes, it’s just tough to think of a compelling headline

We toyed with “Loose lips sink businesses.”    Or:  “Parse the ones you want to keep.”

We’ll spare you (and us).   We’re talking the decline of grammar, at work and at home, a subject that’s engaged (and often enraged) more than quite a few writers, journalists, and columnists in a literal war of words.  

The reasons for misusing affect-effect, I and me, dangling modifiers and the like are multifarious:   Little educational emphasis on writing principles, the domination of social media, even the informality of our world today.   The rise of OMG, LOL, pictorial emoticons and 140 characters, by themselves, negate elegant phrasing and paragraphs.

No one agrees on one overriding cause.  Nor, unfortunately, about the solutions.   Nearly 50 percent of the 400-something employers surveyed in 2012 by SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) and AARP (we hope you know the acronym) indicated they were increasing training, and offering more printed and online guidelines, coaches, and templates.  Again, no single panacea.

Generally, those most alarmed by the trend underscore its negative outcomes, from mistakes in marketing materials that have to be corrected to not-so-great client/customer perceptions.  The conclusion by most?   Good grammar, which shouldn’t be an oxymoron, is the architecture of good writing and, by extension, good thinking and clear understanding.

Which brings us to a remedy.  How about reviving the antique art of sentence diagramming? Created in the mid 1800s by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it’s an illustrated map, also called a parse tree, of the logic behind a sentence.  It combines visuals with the appeal of a puzzle, showing how each word fits into the structure of a sentence.  Think building blocks, with easy-to-use lines and diagonals.

No doubt, this elementary school module had its foes.  After all, parsing a sentence is akin to eating canned non-gourmet peas that have been cooked to mush (thanks to my Mom).  But then I hear her voice:  “Do it; it’ll be good for you.” 

POPULAR PHRASES WE'D LIKE TO CHANGE #4

Suddenly, it’s everywhere. 

Used in one of last year’s episodes of ABC-TV’s Modern Family and, now, as the title of an HBO-created movie.

Screaming at us via The Wall Street Journal’s headlines, and other media.

Front and center in book titles and, yes, in score-keeping apps.

Yup, you guessed it:  “Game-changer.”

The original meaning, we understand, was simple, indicating a visionary person or institution who/which achieved breakthroughs with ideas and innovations that shifted the nature of business or the world.   The late Steve Jobs was certainly a game-changer.  Like him or not, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook qualifies.  Other non-tech examples range from FedEx to the anonymous founders of Wikipedia.  [Announcing our game-changer challenge:  Everyone’s invited to identify lesser-known examples of GCs.]

Yet, after a while, the repeated use of any popular phrase wears thin.  Especially when it’s applied to items and people who do not qualify, even with the broadest credentials, as innovative or insightful.   John Cain and Sarah Palin in their 2008 U.S. Presidential race?  A well-known oil company that angles for ideas submitted by engineers, designers, and other professionals?  And, the latest game changer:  Former professional athletes competing against amateurs in intramural games of all kinds?

Really. 

Then come our next series of questions:  If an individual or establishment is designated a game-changer, does the title ever need to be re-earned?  And how would that be judged … and by whom?  Here’s one very recent example:  The current CEO of a well-respected Global 500 just admitted that the company had lost its innovative edge.  So is there a Hall of Fame for the once and former game changers? 

Okay, this is all purely silly conjecture.  Yet ask yourself when the cursor continues to blink in your document:  Is it easier to pick up a well-worn contemporary phrase – and hope your audiences will get it?  Or, instead, examine the words that would be worthy of your meaning?

POPULAR PHRASES WE'D LIKE TO CHANGE #3

There’s a not-so-new four-letter word we love to hate, one that the media (and our professions) are all over.

In one word?  Icon. 

At least five times a week, sometimes more (depending on the news and featured celebrity), headlines and Web copy label a style as “iconic” or a recently deceased personage, an “icon.”  Now, please don’t misunderstand us:  Elizabeth Taylor, for one, was the ultimate Hollywood icon, an enduring and classic symbol of the acting industry.  And Ralph Lauren could be deemed an iconic designer who popularized that certain je ne sais quoi of preppie-dom.

As communications stylists, we liberally toss around the word as representative of our ideas.  Developing a series of icons, for instance, enables us to communicate in a pictorial shorthand a desired action, a behavior, a brand to a set of stakeholders.  Geeks, too, have seized on these images as signaling quick entrances or exits into different computer programs and files.  [Steve Jobs, we thank you.]

Too, don’t forget that our favorite four letters originated with the Greek meaning “image,” associated at that time with a religious work of art from Eastern Christianity.  As defined by art historians, icons are usually flat panel paintings – also carvings, castings, embroideries, printings – picturing a religious being or objects such as angels.  Colors in these artworks also had iconic (ahem!) meanings, with red used for divine life; gold, the radiance of heaven; blue, human life.

With all that serious history, it’s difficult to call even the moderately famous “icons.”  [Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen’s late and great saxophonist, does fit that bill, in our opinion.]  Or describe a popular style, like the wearing of Uggs, as iconic.  [Add your own two favorite icons here.]

Maybe we’ll know it’s time to retire the word when Fox re-brands “American Icon.”