W A M C
Northeast
Public Radio]
|
[Originally Broadcast on
W A M C Northeast Public Radio] |
A while back, the New York Times ran a front page story with this headline
And we're not talking about high school dropouts. These are folks with college degrees working in white collar jobs. They can press the keys on the keyboard, but they can't communicate. Let me give you an example. Here's a statement taken from a proposal submitted by one large corporation to another in an effort to get them as a client:
So what's the problem?
It's summed up in a phrase Dr. Leo Rockas, Dr. Write's favorite college English teacher used to write all over our papers: Pompous Jargon. The business world is riddled with it. Normal people who speak and write just fine when they're at home turn into blithering idiots when they get to work.
Can you imagine what Homer might say when Gladys asks:
"My plan is to establish our residential disposal operation to include identifying recyclable items and soliciting collection support from the teenaged male child unit for certain portions of those materials which can be incorporated into the overall trash management operation and then routing the appropriate trash receptacles to the proper venue so that we can build a system that is ultimately scaleable for the broader needs which occur during holiday periods and yet be responsive to unforeseen increases that naturally occur."
You get the point: Pompous Jargon.
But wait! (you might exclaim.) You don't understand! We have our own language here at Worldwide Widgets. It's very special and very unique and only a select few can understand it.
Well, I guess we all want to feel special. But if your goal is to communicate, to get your ideas across and be understood, then specialness be damned.
Dr. Write was working with a corporate salesperson recently and asked him to read aloud a paragraph from a sales letter he had written. When he finished, we asked him to sum up what he was trying to tell the client. He thought for a moment, then said: "We can do it faster and cheaper."
There was a momentary pause, then we both laughed. He deleted the paragraph and typed 'We're faster and cheaper.'
If only everything we wrote was as straightforward as that.
What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence. A recent survey of 120 corporations concluded that a third of the nation's blue-chip corporations write so they're spending as much as 3.1 billion dollars on remedial training.
This is good news for Dr. Write. We benefit from some of that 3.1 billion by teaching writing to the authors of their illiterate e-mails, but it's bad news for those who lose their jobs or, at the very least, never get promoted because no one can figure out what they're trying to say.
"Our plan is to establish mail services, routing, workflow, and agent support for portions (as identified in this proposal) of the overall Account Management operation, while building a platform that can ultimately scale for broader needs and be responsive to the unforeseen surprises that naturally occur."
Want to read that again? I'm sure you would rather not. It's deadly. And the ironic thing abut it is that it's grammatically correct. The period is in the right place, there are commas where there should be, and there aren't any run-on sentences, dangling participles, or sentence fragments. (Remember those? You first heard about them in fifth grade and every year after that and you still don’t recognize them.)
"Honey? When are you going to put out the garbage?"
That guy should run for office.