I get paid to write and my colleagues get paid to write too. In the past weeks, some of my colleagues have earned their pay, churning out press releases, internal mails, FAQs, and “slide decks” for managers to help the staff understand why certain organizational changes were made within the company.
Today I am going to share some of the highlights with you. But before I do, allow me to say that these colleagues worked hard, they worked late, they worked under a lot of pressure. Allow me to add that I am by no means perfect and might, under similar circumstances, have lost my senses and lost the ability to think straight. But I do hope I would never have produced any of the following doozies:
- Jane Doe has decided to leave the company to embark on new personal opportunities with her family. What ever happened to spending more time with one’s family? Since when do we “embark” on “opportunities” with our loved ones?
- Following the birth of his first child, Jack Sprat has decided to leave the company for personal reasons. I see, so our gentlemen executives are now having babies.
Among the tips for managers in a communications guide prepared to help them keep their teams updated on internal changes were the following gems of wisdom:
- Having an awareness and respect for the pulse of your employees can help you create the right touch points for achieving a coalition of purpose. What, for Pete’s sake, is a “coalition of purpose”? What has happened to simple language?
- By addressing employees in small group settings, you can treat employees as customers. Ewww, they will so appreciate being treated as customers. Perhaps they meant to say that the atmosphere is intimate, personal, and genuine in small group settings and that the employees will be more willing to ask questions in such settings?
This material was not only written by professionals, but presumably approved by higher ranking individuals. At the risk of sound like a right arrogant prat, this reminds me of the six golden rules of writing that George Orwell introduced in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
