Recently a thread went around the Adaptive Path email lists about consultant-speak and how to battle the incessant plague of bad jargon and meaningless phrases. This was yet another reminder that clear, human communications has become the exception, not the norm, of everyday business life.
This makes me both angry and sad. In an attempt to be clear and concise, we instead fall into the trap of formal, jargony words, and empty, distant language. People that talk this way don’t sound human, they sound canned. Canned conversation lacks all the things that make communication fun: engaging language, fluid changes in topic, personal experience, and human messiness.
It’s a seductive trap, and I know I’ve fallen into it more than once. In my quest to battle the bulge and reclaim brevity, I’ve found 4 tools that help trim the fluff.
Take it to the Max(ims)
Grice’s Maxims, that is. Grice’s Maxims are the work of philosopher Paul Grice. His work focused on the relationship between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning. He studied how we say what we mean, and how much people get what we mean by what we say. He proposed 4 maxims that are the foundations of clear communications. Although these were created to govern both written and spoken communications, they come in incredibly handy when writing for business.
It doesn’t matter to whom you are writing, about what you are writing, nor to what end. Grice’s maxims will keep you on track.
- Maxim of Quality : Truth
* Do not say what you believe to be false.
* Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. - Maxim of Quantity : Information
* Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
* Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. - Maxim of Relation : Relevance
* Be relevant. - Maxim of Manner : Clarity
* Avoid obscurity of expression.
* Avoid ambiguity.
* Be brief.
* Be orderly.
How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
A great way to gut-check your writing is to visualize it. Seeing quantity can improve quality…do the words you’re using roll up into the point you’re trying to make?
Wordle is the fastest, most fun way I’ve found to literally see the message and identify themes and trends in your piece. Using simple word counts, Wordle clouds make it easy to know what words you’re using most so that you can adapt your writing to bring home the concepts that matter most.
For example, here’s what this post looks like in Wordle:
Become a Meaning Matador by fighting the bull
I recently finished reading A Bullfighter’s Guide : Why business people speak like idiots and it was like a breath of fresh air. The authors outline four traps that are at the root of crappy, slangish writing:
- the Obscurity trap
- the Anonymity trap
- the Hard-sell
- the Tedium trap
Because they consider the bullfighting work to be part of a movement, not simply a book, they have multiple ways to help folks learn and keep good habits.
- 1. The book, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (A Bullfighter’s Guide). You can get it from Amazon.
- Bullfighter software, a Microsoft Word plug-in that catches you in the act of writing meaningless blather. Caveat: It only works on the Windows platform, not the Mac or Linux or anything else. (Go ahead…make the jokes. Feel better? Great.)
- My favorite is The Mystery Matador service on their website, where you can drop in a chunk of writing (no less than 500 characters) and get an instant assessment of the readability and the bullshit quotient. For example, running the Mystery Matador on this post yields this summary:
Explore the Flesch-pots of Readability
Is there a way to measure good writing? Overall, writing is subjective, but readability…well, Mr. Flesch worked pretty hard to make it measurable. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability test vetts for ease of reading for contemporary academic English. How does it work? Like this.
Hmmmm. Not helpful? Thanks to the nice folks over at Bullfighter, you can get a quick take of the test on your writing sample. If you use the Mystery Matador, they toss in the Flesch test for free.
These four tools have made me take a good hard look at my writing, tone it up, tighten the points and focus on writing to communicate…not to impress.
Do you have other tips and tricks? Share them in the comments section!
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