

Why Is Business Writing so Awful? - azsromej
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100501/why-is-business-writing-so-awful.html

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matrix
Business writing (the kind that tells you about best-of-breed, market-leading
solutions) is awful because it is written by people who do not understand
their product, their market, or worse, both.

You'll notice that business writing of this type says very little in many
words. That's because the author doesn't know what to write, so they resort to
vague phrases that say everything and nothing. Technical documentation
sometimes suffers from this too (e.g. "Fznoozlator: Fznoozlates the
document").

Someone who truly understands the business benefits of their offering and
their customers will write text that reflects that. That's why the Woot and
Saddleback Leather examples are so good. It's a lot harder to write this sort
of widely compelling content for enterprise software, but a skilled marketer
can still communicate the value proposition well. Problem is, most skilled
marketers would rather slit their own wrists than work on that kind of boring
product.

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replicatorblog
I think one of the first signs of bad business writing is equating the number
of google hits for a term with its real life impact. This was a fun trope in
2000, but in an age of content farms and repeated links its kind of
meaningless. e.g. I just searched for a random term "Gargamel Robot Fan" and
got 15,000+ results.

That said, I like the products JF mentioned, but I think the universe of
customers who like the cheeky tone of the companies he mentioned is fairly
small. The Saddleback backs cost hundreds of dollars, Woot plays to an
educated techie crowd, the farm he mentions is a super local business. You've
got this venn diagram of people with a broad liberal education crossed with
folks who have large sums of money for big discretionary purchases.

I work in the world of medical devices, specifically diabetes. It is a $130B
industry and while some companies try to get conversational, the truth is most
don't want a tongue in cheek/casual/authentic tone when it comes to their
health. It might be conditioning, but people seem to like the idea of a
massive company filled with scientists that seems "robust" if bland. I'm sure
its similar in other categories.

I love the Saddleback copy, but it is not universally applicable.

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eavc
Totally agree and well said. You've hit on my major frustration with both
Fried and Seth Godin. It's almost snobbery. Expecting a level of fun and
"humanness" from ALL businesses when really that only applies to a scarce few.

That's why we see the same few examples over and over again.

Cupcake stores, sneaker companies, farms, trendy software firms, design
companies, etc. etc.

Of course they are going to have interesting language; they're emotional
products and services.

But that's not applicable to server technology, serious consulting firms,
medical, accounting, law, 99% of B2B and a slew of other types of companies.

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Angostura
The examples he gives are "fun" and "human" but the point he makes can be
broadened out. Much business writing is simply lazy and cliched. This is
compounded by the fact often a company won't want to describe its products in
simple, accessible terms because the products need to be made to sound
complex, mysterious, worth a lot of you money. So you tend to get terminology
inflation.

~~~
eavc
True, but that's a different post/article that he didn't write.

In fact, your final sentence there would make for a much more interesting
article than, "Business language suuuucks."

------
codingthewheel
"The truth is, most US academic prose is appalling: pompous, abstruse,
claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian,
Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead."

[David Foster Wallace, _Authority and American Usage_ ]

This applies to modern business prose in spades.

~~~
replicatorblog
Are European academics more efficient with their words? I have no quibble with
the comment, but I do think the groundless criticism of American thinkers is
kind of lame. I realize its the quote not the poster.

~~~
jrockway
Much academic writing, US or non-US, is barely comprehensible and is certainly
never enjoyable to read. I didn't realize this in college, but there is a
reason English is a requirement for many science majors. Not to be "well
rounded", but so that people trying to learn from your work don't want to kill
themselves after reading your paper.

Most CS papers I've read have been good (English is just another programming
language; follow a few rules and you're in the top 20%), but most hard science
(medicine, chemistry, physics) have been terrible to the point of
incomprehensibility. It's sad -- like the article says, hire a writer.

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jlangenauer
The reason business writing is so awful is because business thinking is
equally awful. Faced with attempting to understand something as complex as a
business, and the society it must operate in, it's of little wonder than most
people fall back on simplistic models described by simplistic language,
usually cribbed from other businesses also who use these same simplistic
models and simplistic language. This is much easier to do than actual original
thinking.

Most people working for most major corporations have little incentive to fully
understand the complexity of the business they work in. All they really need
to care about is knowing enough to do their job. Exceptional people, when you
find them in businesses, are the ones who understand a far greater degree of
the complexity of the business, and have been able to place that within the
context of a greater understanding of society.

Start-ups are different, where the incentives are markedly different: if you
do not understand your business and the society it operates in, then you fail.
I think this explains why much of the leading-edge business thinking comes
from startups.

I can only understand the adulation of 37Signals in terms of the intellectual
squalor of business in general. All 37Signals has done is been competent and
hand-working, and they have obviously thought long and hard about what their
business is and does, and the environment it operates in. This should not be
exceptional in the slightest degree, yet it is - and this speaks volumes about
the low standard of thinking that permeates much of the rest of the commercial
world.

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BoppreH
Vague words are completely useless, yes, but sometimes just funny stories
aren't good either.

Not uncommonly I find a link (in HN even) to a software product page and,
arriving there, I'm greeted with pages and pages explaining what is all about
and why I should use it. The pages are long, spread apart and in not-so-
obvious places. Ah, there's also a 15 minute demo with a non-descriptive
start. Fast forwarding shows some guy playing with a console terminal, but I
can't even read what is he doing.

So, this is my two cents: not only you have to captivate your reader, but you
must first show him where to start and convince him it's worth his time,
either by already starting with something interesting or by making it short.

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jessriedel
Specifically, I think it's the use of the words "tool", "resource",
"solution", "service", etc, as a synonym for "thing". Above the urinal where I
work, there's a flyer for VPP. The first sentence is "What is VPP? It's a tool
for improving lab safety". From this you might think VPP is a physical thing
you hold in your hand, but no. By "tool" they really mean a managerial
protocol/technique.

By the way, programmers, you aren't much better. Think how frickin' generic
the word "developer" is.

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rimantas
There is an enjoyable book on the subject:
<http://www.fightthebull.com/book.asp>

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tumult
Probably because it's written by business people.

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ThomPete
Business writing is awful because it often tries to create bell-curve models
for things that are not bell-curve worthy.

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joubert
There's no dramatic arc

