Clear As Mud?
Have you ever read something and wondered what on Earth the writer was trying to convey, even after reading two or three times?
There’s a tendency in business to use grandiose writing styles that may seem very powerful and in keeping with management thinking, but that actually leave the reader confused and unclear about what’s being conveyed as the key message.
What about this piece from a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog by Bryan Garner (March 21st 2013)?
“It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivising colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergise future-proof assets with your global knowledge repository.”
That sounds pretty important and weighty, so it must have come from a relevant and credible source, right? Wrong! HBR used this piece to make a point; even they’ve probably never seen anything quite that outrageous written in the business community!
The point is this: keep writing simple, clear, intelligible and easy to understand. Nobody, for example, in a pre-qualification assessment panel, deciding if you deserve a place in a tender list, will give you higher scores for trying to come across as ‘flash’ and contemporary, only to leave him / her wondering from which planet you hail! Nobody will be more impressed if you litter your written material with business clichés than if you don’t (or spoken communication, for that matter). Nobody will have a clearer understanding of your key strengths and capabilities, or of the benefits they can expect to enjoy from working with you, if you come across as having made too much effort to appear business-like. Quite the opposite, in fact: you may well leave people questioning your real credibility, which would be a major back-fire!
The most effective way to earn people’s attention is to issue brief, readable and easy-to-understand documents. The use of so-called ‘biz-speak’ may well create the impression that you’ve included standard ‘boilerplate’ phrases in order to be viewed as ‘one of the gang’ in terms of credible players in your field. Why not stand out from the crowd by offering something much easier for people’s brains to digest within their attention spans? We know the human brain can hold on to an average of 7 +/- 2 pieces of information at a time, so let’s not reduce that number by clouding our critical messages with ‘noise’. The easier it is for the reader to understand your key messages about your strengths, successes and capabilities, the more likely you are to win that place on a tender list, to achieve that desired outcome from your e-mail, to score a high grade for your dissertation or to gain the support of your staff for a corporate campaign.
We’ll come back to this topic in future blog posts. There’s a lot to be discussed on this subject but, for now, let’s keep it short and simple!