Plain-Spoken, Not Corporate
Jargon is not a sign of expertise. It is a place to hide.
Read this sentence and tell me what it means. We leverage bespoke, client-centric solutions to drive scalable outcomes across the customer journey.
You cannot, and neither can I, and neither could the person who wrote it. That is not a failure of comprehension. It is a sentence engineered to survive without a meaning, and there are millions of them, sitting on the websites of businesses run by clever people who would never say anything remotely like that out loud.
Where the jargon comes from
Nobody sets out to write like this. It arrives by absorption. You read the websites of businesses that look successful, and you notice that they all sound a particular way, and you conclude — quite logically — that this must be the register in which serious businesses speak. So you learn it. You get good at it. And the better you get, the less you sound like anybody at all.
There is also a second reason, less flattering and more common than anyone admits. Jargon is a very effective way of avoiding commitment.
If I tell you I deliver strategic communications solutions, I have promised you nothing and I cannot be held to anything. If I tell you I write the things you cannot bring yourself to write, and I tell you when your idea is bad, I have said something true, and you can hold me to it, and I might be wrong in public. The vague version is safer. It is safer in exactly the way that hiding is safer.
The cost of sounding like everyone else
Corporate language does a specific kind of damage: it makes you unmemorable, which is quite an achievement for something that was only trying to be professional.
Unmemorable, because interchangeable words produce an interchangeable business. If your description of yourself could be lifted wholesale onto a competitor’s site without anybody noticing, you have written a description of your industry, not of yourself.
People can feel evasion even when they cannot name it. A sentence with no meaning in it registers, somewhere below conscious thought, as a person who is not quite telling you the truth. And once that feeling arrives, no amount of polish gets rid of it.
How to strip it out
Take any sentence you have written about your business and ask: would I say this to someone across a table, in a pub, if they asked what I do?
If the honest answer is no — then write down what you would actually say. Say it out loud first, then write down what came out. It will be shorter. It will contain a real verb. It will probably contain an opinion, which the original carefully did not.
That is your copy. It was always your copy. You simply translated it into a language nobody speaks, because you thought that was what was required of you.
It never was.
This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.
