"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]
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.
I have a feeling Wallace is comparing the entirety of the American academic corpus—around 250 years of research—with the entirety of Europe's ~1500 years, and drawing a conclusion based on random sampling without weighting for time. He might call modern European academia "Americanized" (or, more gently, "Westernized.")
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.
Certainly I've found that college level text books by and for the the US market tend to be a good three times as long (and twice as expensive) as books by and for the European market, yet still basically cover the same material. I'm not really sure if that says more about the authors or the publishers though
If academic writing is obese, business writing is anorexic.
Both unhealthy, but in different ways. My metaphor breaks down here for a second, but what I think they share in common is laziness of language.
In my experience, the scholar is too lazy to avoid convoluted sentences with thousand-pound meanings that take more work to read than they did to assemble. The business-writer is too lazy to anchor words that are lighter than air to sentences with substance to keep them grounded.
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.
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.
I think you're missing the significance of quotation marks around Google search terms. To replicate Jason Fried's results, you need to search with quotation marks.
A search for "Gargamel Robot Fan" with quotation marks returns zero hits.
But I think your second point about medical devices marketing not working so well with a cheeky tone is good.
Exactly, there are so many places where authentic or ironic speech isn't appropriate and wouldn't work. The phrase "Full service solutions provider" sends a lot of signals about being willing to deal with a low level of definition and a high level of bureaucracy on a project. A farmer whose first priority is "stimulating soil biota" sounds passionate but difficult to work with.
Great point about, "full-service solutions provider."
It's the kind of language I'd try to avoid using, but the alternative is to use 100 words to say something like, "Our company can handle the entire process, from strategy and planning to the execution of the smallest detail, or we can take on only the pieces where our support is most needed."
Which is better, the simplicity of sounding like an average joe or the simplicity of using 4 words?
Again, just because that language is occasionally left awash in a sea of meaninglessness, doesn't mean it can't be useful and send meaningful information.
That's good copy. I think it's very good, actually.
But it's use of "global impact," "interoperability," "integrated," and passages like, "The award-winning EpicCare EMR is known for being fast and physician-friendly. Integrated access and revenue systems simplify administration," are the kinds of things that get made fun of unfairly.
It's an easy target because so often those terms are over-used, but as someone else commented here in talking about "full service, end-to-end, etc." sometimes you have awkward or niche language because you're describing something awkward or niche.
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.
If you're going to be that literal about it, all businesses are run by and comprised of humans, so how could they be anything other than human?
I'm talking about the idea that everything needs to be friendly, personal, casual, charming, quirky, and the like. The reason that it shouldn't be that way is that it's not always appropriate or useful.
I can point you to a lot of people who would never go to Woot because they feel uncomfortable with that particular brand of quirky. They are losing out on sales because of it, but they are hoping that the sales they gain will offset the ones they lose.
They can do that because they have no aspirations to be amazon.com. Microsoft cannot do that. ERPs shouldn't do this - quirky is not what makes you comfortable when dealing with business-critical software. Heck, personal and friendly may not be! (If you've ever used IFS...)
Because what constitutes personal and friendly is context dependent and highly variable from one person to another.
Neutral is often the right way to go.
What kind of language should the American Cancer Society use? What about the Department of Justice? How about an industrial farming equipment manufacturer?
What some would find amusing, some would find a waste of time and frustrating, and some would find insulting or offensive. That's fine when your target market is pretty much on the same page about that stuff. Just go after them and offend all the others.
But it's not as good when that market is not.
With certain types of businesses, the target market is easier to cluster around some style choices. With other types, either the market or the subject-matter doesn't lend itself to friendly and personal.
In general, the writing across the board for this stuff could be BETTER but that's not the same thing as it being more personal and more friendly. That link to Epic below shows some good copywriting that's not either, but it's clear and forceful and just the right tone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
29 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 67.1 ms ] thread[David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage]
This applies to modern business prose in spades.
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.
Both unhealthy, but in different ways. My metaphor breaks down here for a second, but what I think they share in common is laziness of language.
In my experience, the scholar is too lazy to avoid convoluted sentences with thousand-pound meanings that take more work to read than they did to assemble. The business-writer is too lazy to anchor words that are lighter than air to sentences with substance to keep them grounded.
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.
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.
A search for "Gargamel Robot Fan" with quotation marks returns zero hits.
But I think your second point about medical devices marketing not working so well with a cheeky tone is good.
Not anymore...
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
It's the kind of language I'd try to avoid using, but the alternative is to use 100 words to say something like, "Our company can handle the entire process, from strategy and planning to the execution of the smallest detail, or we can take on only the pieces where our support is most needed."
Which is better, the simplicity of sounding like an average joe or the simplicity of using 4 words?
Again, just because that language is occasionally left awash in a sea of meaninglessness, doesn't mean it can't be useful and send meaningful information.
Here is how one might write copy for medical software:
http://www.epic.com/about-index.php
If you look around their site you might be pleasantly surprised. You might also notice that they do not write press releases.
But it's use of "global impact," "interoperability," "integrated," and passages like, "The award-winning EpicCare EMR is known for being fast and physician-friendly. Integrated access and revenue systems simplify administration," are the kinds of things that get made fun of unfairly.
It's an easy target because so often those terms are over-used, but as someone else commented here in talking about "full service, end-to-end, etc." sometimes you have awkward or niche language because you're describing something awkward or niche.
Not all abstract language is empty.
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.
If you're going to be that literal about it, all businesses are run by and comprised of humans, so how could they be anything other than human?
I'm talking about the idea that everything needs to be friendly, personal, casual, charming, quirky, and the like. The reason that it shouldn't be that way is that it's not always appropriate or useful.
Why not? I hate dealing with companies that aren't personal and friendly. I am not a robot.
They can do that because they have no aspirations to be amazon.com. Microsoft cannot do that. ERPs shouldn't do this - quirky is not what makes you comfortable when dealing with business-critical software. Heck, personal and friendly may not be! (If you've ever used IFS...)
Neutral is often the right way to go.
What kind of language should the American Cancer Society use? What about the Department of Justice? How about an industrial farming equipment manufacturer?
What some would find amusing, some would find a waste of time and frustrating, and some would find insulting or offensive. That's fine when your target market is pretty much on the same page about that stuff. Just go after them and offend all the others.
But it's not as good when that market is not.
With certain types of businesses, the target market is easier to cluster around some style choices. With other types, either the market or the subject-matter doesn't lend itself to friendly and personal.
In general, the writing across the board for this stuff could be BETTER but that's not the same thing as it being more personal and more friendly. That link to Epic below shows some good copywriting that's not either, but it's clear and forceful and just the right tone.
In fact, your final sentence there would make for a much more interesting article than, "Business language suuuucks."
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.
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.
By the way, programmers, you aren't much better. Think how frickin' generic the word "developer" is.