Banished Words for the New Year

Protectors of the English language at Lake Superior State University have declared 15 words and phrases to be “shovel-ready” for inclusion on its 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

The List first appeared after a New Year’s Eve party in 1975.  Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, the media, education, technology, and elsewhere.

We commend LSSU for this important service.

Anyone wishing to submit a word or a phrase for consideration should first check the complete list on the website.

The 2010 list:

Shovel-ready

Transparent / transparency

Czar

Tweet

App

Sexting

Friend as a verb

Teachable moment

In these economic times . . .

Stimulus

Toxic assets

Too big to fail

Bromance

Chillaxin’

OBAMA-prefix or roots

Marketing With Case Studies

Recently I completed a writing assignment for a provider of analytical tools and related services to major international banks and others in the financial and investment industries – and I thought it would be good to share the exercise with readers of Business Writing Today.

My client wanted to showcase one of its key services in a way that would be subtler and more versatile than a traditional advertisement.  They had decided to create a case study – often called an “advertorial” – for this purpose.  The idea was to highlight the main features and benefits of the service and show how it solved a specific problem for its customer, an international bank.

Advertorials differ from traditional advertisements in that they are designed to look like articles in the newspapers or magazines they appear in.  In such cases, disclaimers such as “special advertising section” are used.  In the case of this assignment, my client is adding the case study to its website, featuring it in its marketing material, and placing it in business periodicals.  In addition, its customer is free to use the case study as it wishes, in its own marketing program.

After studying the information provided by my client and becoming familiar with the service, I interviewed the appropriate official at the bank to learn about his experience with my client’s service.  Specifically, I found out about the problem at the bank that needed to be solved, how they used the service, and the happy result.

After I completed my final draft, my client and the bank put the draft through several rounds of revision and fine-tuning.

The case study begins with a general description of the bank and its business.  Next, there is a commentary about the bank’s need to correct a particular problem.  Following that came a brief description of my client’s service.  Then quotations from the bank official spoke directly to the specific problem and how well it was solved by my client’s service.  The final element is a product / service description and a general description of my client’s overall business.

Advertorials have been used as a marketing method since the 1960s, mainly in niche marketing and trade publications.  Lately they have become more popular in mainstream publications.  Many companies have begun to experiment with employing them to promote products and services without incurring advertising agency expense.

Healthy vs. Healthful

Our language changes constantly.  Over time, the difference between similar words becomes blurred and finally they come to mean the same thing.  The distinction is gone and the language suffers another loss.  Such is the case with “healthy” and “healthful”.  In popular usage, the two have become interchangeable.

My understanding has always been that “healthful” means contributing to the state of good health and “healthy” means enjoying the state of good health.  Eating healthful food can make you healthy.  My Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition backs me up: healthful – “favorable to the health of mind or body; healthy – “enjoying or indicative of good health”.

“Healthy” has been a trendy word for a long time.  Over the years it has gained strength and all but pushed “healthful” aside.  Holdouts like me are accused of being pretentious when we talk about a “healthful diet”.  I don’t mind.  Sometimes you have to take a stand.

What does this have to do with writing in the business world?  All “healthy” all the time is lazy writing.  We should keep the difference between “healthful” and “healthy” in mind whenever we come up against health-related copy.  Skilled copy-writers should be able to retain the punch of the word  “healthy” and still give “healthful” its due.

Comments?

10 Rules of Successful Communication

I’m reading Frank Luntz’s 2007 bestseller, Words That Work,  and felt compelled to share his list of rules for successful communication.  They underscore the book’s subtitle:  “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear” and they are useful reminders for all of us who try to communicate in the business world.

1.  Simplicity: Use Small Words. Avoid words that might cause your readers to reach for the dictionary.  They likely won’t bother to look up unfamiliar words.  Instead, they’ll either let your real meaning sail over their heads or, worse, they’ll misunderstand you.

2.  Brevity: Use Short Sentences. “Be as brief as possible.  Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much.”

3.  Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy. “People have to believe it to buy it.  As Lincoln once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  If your words lack sincerity, if they contradict accepted facts, circumstances, or perceptions, they will lack impact.”

4.  Consistency Matters. “Repetition.  Repetition. Repetition.  Good language is like the Energizer Bunny.  It keeps going . . . and going . . . and going.”  Find a good message and stick to it.  Coke created “It’s the real thing” in 1943.  Wheaties created the “Breakfast of Champions” tagline in 1935, the same year Campbell’s Soup came up with “M’m! M’m! Good!”

5.  Novelty: Offer Something New. Businesses should try to tell customers something that gives them a brand-new take on an old idea.  If successful, the new message will bring a “sense of discovery”.  If your message generates an “I didn’t know that” response, you have succeeded.

6.  Sound and Texture Matter. “The sound and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves.”  For example: Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is” and M&M’s “Melts in your mouth . . .”

7.  Speak aspirationally. “Messages need to say what people want to hear.  This is the one area where politicians often have the edge over the corporate community.  It’s very difficult to craft advertising language that touches people at the most fundamental, primal level, by speaking to their deepest hopes, dreams, and fears.”  The key to success is to “personalize and humanize the message to trigger an emotional remembrance”.

8.  Visualize. “The slogans we remember for a lifetime almost always have a strong visual component, something we can see and almost feel.  Allstate’s ‘You’re in good hands’, first created in 1956, went so far as to include the cupped hands visual in its logo to remind people of its peace-of-mind guarantee.

9.  Ask a Question. “‘Got Milk?’ may be the most memorable print ad campaign of the past decade.  The creator realized . . . that it’s sometimes not what you say but what you ask that really matters.”

10.  Provide Context and Explain Relevance. “You have to give people the ‘why’ of a message before you tell them the ‘therefore’ and the ’so that.’”

Misuse Alert: Begging the Question

Guest post by Ron Vlieger

It seems that almost every day now you hear people using the phrase, “That begs the question.”  Unfortunately, most people get it wrong.

I suspect they’re like me; they know that for some reason that isn’t quite clear, it sounds smarter than, “That raises the question.”  So they think if they use it, they’ll sound smart, too.

I was lucky.  Maybe I picked it up in Freshman Writing, or maybe I heard William F. Buckley use it on Firing Line to put old Bella Abzug in her place.

In any case, I had a vague notion it meant more than raising a question, and a little research revealed that it is a logical fallacy.  It means to assume what you are trying to prove.

If all WFB had been saying was, “Bella, that raises a question,” milquetoast responses like that would’ve killed Firing Line in its first season.  What he was really saying was, “Bella, I believe your argument is a classic case of petitio principia.  You’re assuming that which you are trying to prove.”

Unfortunately for his opponents, WFB could spot a logical fallacy from a hundred paces.

Here’s an example of begging the question that turned up with a little web research:

Person A: Selling liquor on Sundays is illegal in this town, because it’s bad.

Person B: They sell liquor in the next town over on Sundays, and everyone’s okay with that.  Why is it bad?

Person A: If it weren’t bad, it wouldn’t be illegal, would it?

Person A demonstrates that begging the question is a form of circular reasoning.  He is begging the question (Why is it bad to sell liquor on Sunday?) because the answer he gives fails to demonstrate that selling liquor on Sunday is bad.  It just assumes it’s bad.

Here’s another, less obvious one:

Person A: I believe you should be a good person.

Person B: But I just want to make as much money as possible and do what I want to do.  Why should I be good?

Person A: Because being good benefits society.

Again, Person A begs the question (Why should I be good?) because the answer he gave is the same as his premise.  “Benefit society” is just another way of saying “Be good.”  Being good is benefiting society.  You might as well say, “Benefiting society benefits society.”

If you’re interested in other logical fallacies, check out a book on composition and rhetoric, such as: The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric.

Ron Vlieger is a financial writer in New York City.

Did Business Jargon Cause the Credit Crunch?

Recently the UK’s Channel 4 ran a documentary called “How the Banks Went Bust.”  Financial experts on the program made it clear that language had been exploited and misused to such an extent that it contributed to the economic disaster.

Comments from the three experts:

Geraint Anderson was one of the UK’s top four brokers before writing his book Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile about “financial philanderings” in the financial services industry.  In the documentary, he said, “we in the City use arcane language and peculiar terminology to confuse those who don’t earn as much as us (i.e., pretty much everyone).  It makes us sound like we’re doing something extraordinarily complicated and technically unfathomable and keeps our potential detractors in the dark.  We are a much harder target if the ‘common man’ feels intimidated by our complex world and doesn’t even understand what we do.  We push around bits of paper.  That’s what we do.  That’s all we do.”

Alchemy Partners’ Jon Moulton, another highly respected financial figure, made this comment: “UK banks got involved with things they couldn’t measure, couldn’t control, didn’t understand.  Some got into very sexy, almost incomprehensible contracts.  Synthetic mezzanine CLO squareds?  Not sure I know what it is either but I promise you that some of the banks have them.”

Neil Smith, the chief investment officer at Corham Capital said, the “simple fact is that things had become so complicated that only those people directly involved with the creation of these products knew what they were.  CDO (collateralized debt obligation) guys had every sales trick in the book . . . .  Their whole strategy was to make people feel silly if they didn’t understand the product.”

Let’s learn from this.  When we encounter unclear communication on an important subject – in business, finance, politics, or elsewhere – somebody is probably hiding something.

[I plead guilty to committing a serious business jargon offense.  According to the Daily Telegraph, “credit crunch” occupies the number 8 spot on their top-20 list of the most despised business jargon terms.]

h/t to Plain English Campaign

Business Writing: The Perils of Miscommunication

•    “Always communicate clearly.”
•    “Keep your target audience in mind.”
•    “Think it through.”

We’ve heard this advice many times over.  So why do managers at top companies and experienced business owners make so many disastrous (and expensive) mistakes in their marketing communication?

A few classic examples from the global business file:

•    Executives at General Motors didn’t understand why the Chevy Nova wasn’t selling well in Latin America until they realized that in Spanish “no va” means “it doesn’t go.”
•    Ford marketed the Comet in Mexico as the Caliente, which literally means “hot.”  Colloquially, it means “horny” or “streetwalker.”
•    Perdue’s slogan, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” was mistranslated into Spanish as “It takes a man to make a chicken aroused.”

We can’t get away with only considering how well we write something.

We must never lose sight of our audience.  How will they receive our message?

Business Plans Don’t Matter to Venture Capitalists?

“A business plan has zero value as a fundraising tool according to new research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.  Entrepreneurs should be perfecting their business, not spending hours refining how their plan looks on paper, say researchers.”  So says a press release from the Smith School, dated April 6, 2009.

This conclusion was based on a study of the business plans of more than 700 dot-com companies from the late-1990s to early-2000s boom era.  The study, “Form or Substance?  The Role of Business Plans in Venture Capital Decision Making,” appears in the May 2009 issue of Strategic Management Journal.

A noted business planning expert, author, and angel investor disagrees.  Tim Berry, president of Palo Alto Software, Inc. (Business Plan Pro) offers this response:

“Isn’t this about as dumb as saying a screenplay doesn’t matter because the audience won’t read it?”

Berry goes on to say that venture capitalists may not read the plans – “but the plan is for you, the startup wanna-be, to know what you’re trying to do, and how much money you need, and why, and what you’re going to spend it on.  You may only show the VCs the presentation, but if you don’t have a plan behind it, with your numbers straight, then they’ll know it.”

Read it all on Berry’s website.

I haven’t read the study, but I’ll take a wild guess and say that most investors have regained their good sense by now, a decade after the dot-com boom.  Nowadays investors need to know that the entrepreneur has worked through the rigor of a serious business plan, is fully aware of the problems ahead, and has well-thought-out solutions.

I do agree that would-be business owners shouldn’t be so consumed with writing business plans that they neglect their companies.  But they can avoid being overwhelmed by seeking the assistance of qualified business consultants / writers to take care of producing solid business plans; leave the time-consuming work to professionals.

Any comments?  Do business plans still matter?

Jargon Watch

The other day Mary Cullen at Business Writing Info called our attention to linguistic inflation in business communication.  Her example: exaggerating commitment beyond 100%.  She’s right.  We should raise the alarm.

As Mary says, “100% effort means full capacity, and is commendable.  Exaggerating commitment to 110%, 200%, 500% makes no sense, and is meaningless jargon that should be avoided in business writing.”

I’m with you on this, Mary.  I once had a boss who was a serial offender.  In meetings with clients he’d proclaim, “We’re dedicated to your success a thousand percent.”  I’d try my best (100%) not to groan and roll my eyes.

Now that we’re fired up on the subject of egregious business jargon, what are some other examples?  For starters, here are a few, with suggestions for correction.

• Out of pocket – unavailable
• Bandwidth – capacity
• Human capital – people
• Leverage (as a verb) – to take advantage of
• Dialogue – talk
• Impact (as a verb) – to have an effect on

Let’s strike a blow for the language and push back against (I mean resist) offensive and confusing jargon.

What are your pet peeves? Let me know and I’ll compile a collection in a future post.

Business Email: 20 Guidelines

Every business should understand that it’s responsible for the content of emails that go out under its name.  Here are some “do and don’t” reminders that we should all keep in mind.

Do:

1. Be clear and concise.  Help your reader by providing context when necessary.
2. Answer questions thoroughly.
3. Always use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.  Proofread and revise before sending.
4. Indicate content and purpose in the subject line.  Be specific.
5. Use “reply” and keep to the message thread.
6. Adopt a legal disclaimer and use it in every email.
7. Have a formal email policy.
8. Write with gender neutrality in mind.
9. Remember that company email isn’t private.  It’s company property.
10. Include complete contact information in your signature.

Don’t:

1. Use too much industry jargon.
2. Capitalize every word in your subject line.  This can be interpreted as spam.
3. Use “reply all” indiscriminately.  If it’s appropriate, go ahead.
4. Use a high-priority flag or “urgent” in your subject line unless it’s warranted.
5. Use language that could be interpreted as libelous, defamatory, sexist, or racist.
6. Treat company email as your own.
7. Send irate emails.  Cool off.  Use the phone.
8. Send emails to a large number of recipients.  This can expose email addresses to unauthorized persons.  Use “bcc” instead.
9. Write long paragraphs.  Readers hate to see “walls of words” and will resist reading such emails.  Instead, break up the text, use bullets.
10. Be redundant.  Say it once.