Our Copywriting Category
In the USA and in Britain, as well as France, Spain and several other countries (except China) there are popular campaigns to try to get government to use ordinary or plain langauge, but this is a hopeless and misguided cause. Why? Because it’s the wrong target. Government is not where the problem starts.
Meaningless and convoluted English starts in the corporate world, with its mutually inconsistent need to appear creative and innovative at the same time as seeking ever higher impact for stories and descriptions that are listless, if not completely lifeless within their natural environment.
So it is that cliches are reheated (for they cannot be born) in corporate publications, web sites, texts and narratives, CEO speeches, reports, internal communications, training programs, with their granularity and their edge creation. Company communications, regrettably, have moved, in grammatical and literary terms, from defenders of the faith to purveyors of complete bullshit in less than two generations.
Words acquire and maintain their meaning through public consensus, not because companies decide what they mean, like Humpty Dumpty, that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”.
The whole point of language is that, like many other things, it must be free of artificial constraint in order to live and to closely express what people want to convey. Like a waterfall it must find its own way through using only the linguistic equivalent of gravity to help it, namely the need for comprehension.
The reason why English has become the modern lingua franca is precisely because it is allowed to find its own way, in some cases, to split into different derived langauges. It is free to live and multiply and certainly forces no words into meanings that are not popularly accepted by their users.
Received corporate-speak English, with its half-understood words, deliberate confusions, rigged culture, convenient ambiguities and general multilingual meaninglessness, should be knocked off the wall, broken into pieces and never put together again.
March 31st, 2012
From Intercourse to Onan: how the email has ruined communications
How often do you send someone an email asking a question or making an inquiry when you might better have phoned them and had a conclusive conversation?
I once sat opposite someone at work who would regularly invite me to lunch with him that same day. By email. We were bleedin’ well opposite each other. But after a while I felt I was also too busy to talk so I too started replying by email.
But we seem to be starting to lose, not only the art of conversation, but the art of communications overall.
For all the world’s obsession with emails, one point is salient and striking (albeit a whopping generalization). Within the last 20 years people in the industrialized and developed countries have changed their principal mode of collective communication from audio telephony to email and text. From communal to solitary.
From two way to one way. From discussion to declamation. Video conferencing hasn’t caught on yet but tapping out text while walking along the pavement has.
And a steady stream of people are regularly dying as they tap out their texts while walking across roads, into walls, off cliffs, or while driving.
And yet the telephone is interactive – you can say ‘hello, what’s up?’, and you can hear the other person respond ‘hi!, I’ve got a bad headache, what are you doing?’ etc. And you dont have to wait for the answer to the question ‘Hey, shall we go for lunch later?’
The email/text can only ever be an unmoderated statement, encouraging people to get used to waiting for an answer when they ask, something they are not particularly used to in live conversation.
Of course they don’t have to wait nearly as long as they would have to if they had sent a letter through the post, but my basis for comparison is not the post but the telephone or live speech.
This extraordinary development from phone to email is an unprecedented technological example of people opting against a more advanced, more immediate and more available communication exchange to a primitive transmission; from an interactive form of intercourse to one way, onanistic comment into the void.
Aristotle would have rejoiced at this stunning confirmation of his transmission-reception dichotomy. It is as if our stone age ancestors took a look at two way radio and collectively decided to stick with ululation in order to communicate.
The advantages of email in the business context are many times more, but few of them reflect well on actual business use. And yet it’s obvious just why the email has caught on and stayed.
Email appeals to and encourages our worst instincts. It allows rest to the wicked and cover to the shy. It turns a conversation into a code, and it turns leadership into disembodied commands, suiting the tens of thousands of appalling bosses who prosper through opting not to communicate properly or clearly in business environments. Email is Pontius Pilate, it comes supplied with a bar of soap and hand towels.
Email is also perfect for the business vice of ambiguity. Are you one of those who do not reply at all if you find the response difficult or too sensitive to make? Do you pray that you do not meet them as this will expose you to that old fashioned face to face where, yes, you really do have to reply to a straight question? It’s the first and surest evidence of cowardice. Nothing enrages people more than the knowledge that someone has got the email that was sent to them and that needs an answer but has decided not to answer it at all.
This cowardice represents the purest expression of ambiguity because there is always that flickering possibility that the intended recipients have not read the email or that it has been ‘lost’ in the ether. Letters really did get lost in the post in the past but we continue to lie to each other about emails that somehow apparently never made it despite being properly addressed and sent.
Rather than reduce ambiguity by appearing to facilitate the yes/no conundrum, email actually increases ambiguity, as even if you do respond you can get away with lazy, gnomic and target-missing answers that would be picked up and corrected immediately by any interlocutor in a live conversation.
Email allows us to send an email saying we are too busy, and fail to understand the irony. Email has brought the practice of interactive meetings to a standstill, as all around the meeting table the small sounds of barely audible clicks and sidelong glances show that no-one is actually participating in the meeting. They are all there but barren in original thought; only their blackberries are fruitful.
Email makes cliches look reasonable and validates the worst excesses of business-speak, making it the favorite communication method of internal communications programs. But above all, it allows secrecy, pretense and pseudo-confidentiality to flourish and copiously rewards those who are engaged in these for a living.
For personal communications, the crimes are more innocent. It means you don’t have to move from your seat in order to conduct a conversation, stilted as it may become.
Because for many people it is less challenging to write on your own than to talk in company, email has the huge benefit of not betraying your feelings, so the recipient has to guess them without being able to look deep into your eyes.
No, despite its many obvious advantages, email has overall been an disaster for communications. It has turned us from social communicants to corner-loving losers with keyboards and RSI.
Let’s hope it is just a passing phase, otherwise companies and individuals will soon stop communicating meaningfully with each other altogether.
Being clear is not the same as being transparent. All company matters will become transparent, but will not necessarily become clear. To attain clarity, intelligent analysis is an important requirement.
Intelligent analysis is an important requirement. But neither expertise nor experience guarantee intelligence. When building reputation, ask not what has been done but what will be done.
Ask not what has been done but what will be done. Few people can replicate their past but almost everyone wants to. They are misguided because history distorts and the past is another planet.
The past is another planet. A modern reputation can be destroyed in a day by a lack of credibility and take years to rebuild. In today’s conditions, public confidence in companies is easily broken.
Public confidence in companies is easily broken. Trust is the ultimate objective for the ethical company. To justify public trust, companies must accept that the brand is dying from disbelief.
The brand is dying from disbelief. Consumers and the social media are speeding the death throes. Everyone is individual but thinks collectively. Everyone is connected to everyone else.
Everyone is connected to everyone else. Collective opinions are temporary and without depth. People relate to ideas and arguments through perception and feeling. Emotion is stronger than reason.
Emotion is stronger than reason. Reality has become relative and subject to impression and refraction for impact. Communicators must understand that truth and reality are different perceptions.
Truth and reality are different perceptions. What companies say is not what is heard. Reputation is not brand, and being clear is not the same as being transparent. Go to top and intone as a mantra or contact me…
If you can recognize the difference between talking at people and discussing with people, or between declaration and debate, then stakeholder engagement and management should come as naturally as asking someone to marry you, although this is not always obvious in the highly rarified corporate world.
Even on this leap year day 29th February, it should be obvious to all women asking their men to marry them that having done so they do need to listen to the answer.
Stakeholder engagement is the process in which a company engages with people or organizations affected by the company or which can affect the company. Unlike marriage proposals, however, this isn’t a selection process. Companies do not choose their stakeholders any more than people choose their relatives (except their spouses).
However, the stakeholder engagement process is necessarily two-sided and is much more akin to a conversation more than a communication. This is why shouting like an Englishman abroad is not particularly effective. Neither is the assumption that someone cannot be a stakeholder if they hate you.
Companies should always try to engage their stakeholders in dialogue to find out what social, environmental and other issues matter most to them about the companies’ performance in order to improve corporate decision-making and increase accountability. Theoretically, at least, transparency should also improve. Even the haters need to be covered by this process. The results can be pleasantly surprising.
Stakeholder engagement is now part of mainstream business practice and central to corporate policy decision-making and delivery. It is also an expectation, not only by those stakeholders themselves but also by those investors who set great store by the way and extent that companies are engaging with those who matter. This is not a once in four years opportunity…
This is why stakeholder engagement should therefore be at the heart of any reputation enhancement agenda. So go on, ask him!
