Business jargon obscuring meaning

Verbosity and jargon mark most corporate communication these days. Here’s part of missive from Cande Nast CEO Chuck Townsend:

 To optimize brand revenue growth, we will shift responsibility for single-site, digital sales and marketing to the brand level. Publishers can now fully leverage their offerings across all platforms. Next month, we will begin newly established brand management meetings where the publishers and editors jointly discuss the growth strategies for their brands.

The only problem with the email was that nobody knew what he was talking about! It’s a warning that jargon serves to obscure not enlighten if it’s overused.

Here are some overused terms that have entered the business ‘space’:

• Site or space. Stores are now retail space.
• Platforms. Products and services are platforms for making profit or improving market share, and often these profits come through pipelines. 
• Pipelines. Nothing to do with pipes. 
• Seamless. Nothing to do with seams.
• Strategies. Everyone needs a strategy. 
• Leverage. Companies now leverage their core competencies. 
• -driven. Wine is fruit-driven, companies are profit- driven, and employees are achievement-driven.

Generation Y learners

My article on Generation Y learners is in the December edition of Training and Development in Australia. Gen Ys are the most rewarded, recognised, and tech savvy generation in living memory. They demand a lot of their employers and of L&D professionals. Members of AITD can read the magazine online.

‘Build’ and ‘spend’ as nouns

If you enjoy the popular TV show  Grand Design, you’ll have quickly caught on to the architect’s use of the word build as a noun: This build is going well.

Now, it seems, that the good people at Flybuys (frequent flyer points system for shoppers) have decided that ‘spend’ can now be used as a noun: Starting today, you’ll earn double FlyBuys points on your spend over $30.

This could be catching.

 

Spelling mistakes cost money

Paul Duncombe, a UK online entrepreneur, says that poor spelling is costing businesses millions of pounds in lost revenue. When shoppers are concerned about the possibility of fraud or being scammed, poor spelling on a website will instantly diminish credibility, and potential customers move on.  A recent study showed that even a single spelling mistake loses sales. 

Concerns about the ability of employees to spell and write just basic English were echoed by James  Fothergill from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).  Mr Fothergill warns that too many employers were having to invest in remedial literacy lessons for their staff.

Getting the basics right, it seems, is essential.

Wordle: a great new tool

 Want to create an abstract image for a report, proposal, or other document? Wordle has a great tool that creates a cloud of words from the text you provide. You can change the colours, font, and design. It’s fast, easy, and fun. Best of all, it’s free!

To boldly go

To split or not to split? The split infinitive remains a point of contention for writers.  An infinitive is split when an adverb is inserted between “to” and the base form of a verb: to boldly go, for instance.  Linguists in the 19th Century believed that because the infinitive of a verb could not be split in Latin, we shouldn’t be able to do the same in English.  This “rule” is, however, broken all the time. The grand-sounding phrase to better serve our customers is found in company mission statements throughout the English-speaking world. 

Many great writers (and the sub-editors of some esteemed publications) seemed to care little whether they split infinitives or not. Here are a few:

Thomas Macaulay: in order to fully appreciate

Lord Byron: to slowly trace the forest’s shady scene

New York Times: failed to correctly diagnose

Douglas Adams in  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has some fun with the Star Trek reference:

In those days men were real men, women were real women, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before.

Most current guides to English today have dropped their objection to the split infinitive. Current wisdom is that split infinitives are best avoided, but are permissible where the alternative would be awkward or ambiguous.

Stutter or stammer?

The film The King’s Speech has brought the issue of stuttering and its treatment to the fore. But is it stutter or stammer, and is there a difference?

Stuttering and stammering are the same thing. Stutter is  more commonly used  in Australia and the USA. Stammer is preferred in the UK and Europe.

Scholars agree that stuttering is present in every culture, and it seems to affect about 1% of the population. It’s ironic that one of the greatest orators of our time, Winston Churchill,  had a problem with stuttering.

Born with a stutter and a lisp, both caused in large measure by a defect in his palate, Churchill was at first seriously hampered in his public speaking. It is characteristic of the man’s perseverance that, despite his staggering handicap, he made himself one of the greatest orators of our time. [Louis J. Alber, The American Mercury, Vol. 55. (1942)]

Indeed.

Cupertino Effect

Have you ever seen the word defiantly in a document when you meant to write definitely? Or fiends when you meant to write friends? Then you’ve probably been a victim of the Cupertino Effect.  It’s the tendency of a spellchecker to replace misspellings with inappropriate suggestions.

The term originated when the word cooperation was often changed to Cupertino by older spell checkers which contained only the hyphenated form co-operation, Cupertino California being the home Apple Inc. If a user inadvertently clicked Change All they would end up with documents with strange phrasing such as valuable experience in international Cupertino or African-German Cupertino.

So the Cupertino Effect has come to mean failing to check that a suggested word is appropriate, though it’s now less of a problem than it used to be.

But good enough reason to be cautious if you ever have to write the word public.

10 Tips for Writing Boring Reports

 The Scientist newsletter recently published an interesting article by Kaj Sand-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen titled Ten Key Tips for Writing Boring Scientific Literature. Much of it is relevant to business writers and those who write reports.  Let’s be honest, there are a lot of reports that could be better. So here’s the list. Give it some thought as you work on your next report. 

• Avoid focus
• Avoid originality and personality
• Write long contributions
• Remove implications and speculations
• Leave out illustrations
• Omit necessary steps of reasoning
• Use lots of abbreviations 
• Suppress humour
• Degrade biology to statistics
• Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

 http://blog.the-scientist.com/2011/02/22/top-10-tips-for-writing-boring-papers/

Visitation or visit?

We can forgive real estate ads for a bit of hyperbole from time to time, but visits from supernatural beings?   A recent ad for a waterfront property in Batemans Bay claims that the prospective buyer can expect “daily visitations from playful dolphins and prolific bird life”.

The word visitation is not just a fancy way of saying visit. A visitation  is either an official or formal act of visiting (by a hospital chaplain or a government inspector),  or a visit by a supernatural being: visitation of angels. Visit means merely ‘to pay a call or stay a  guest’.

But still, the South Coast of New South Wales is such a heavenly place, perhaps one CAN expect a  supernatural being to pay a call.