Nonsense Business Language: What's It Good For?
There was the program director, who talked exclusively in nonsense business language: 'We are attempting to pro-activate the community by utilizing a series of directives intended to maximize communicative agreeance.' ~ Tina Fey in her memoir Bossy Pants
What’s nonsense business language good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Yet we see it on many websites, especially those of technical and industrial suppliers. True, despite poor webcopy, these companies manage to stay in business. The rationale is, “We’re doing fine. No need to hire a professional to communicate who we are and what services and products we provide.” So the leaders of these companies choose to continue communicating to potential business partners and customer prospects like Mr. Spock instead of humans living on planet Earth.
Certainly, this thinking leads to lost opportunity not calculated in an annual report.
Instead of relying on a professional writer to develop website and other promotional copy, these business thinkers task the intern, low-level sales or operations employee, or maybe even the technical writer to pull something together in the spare time of their 9-to-5 day..
The result is business jargon strong in hyperbole and weak in information. The copy is convoluted, wordy, dry, ineffective business speak that means little to a prospect seeking to understand what the business does and what differentiates it.
Here are examples of nonsense business language that I have seen:
- appropriately facilitate enabled markets
- distinctively build competitive best-of-class data and e-commerce deliverables
- seamlessly conceptualize interdependent internal or ‘organic’ sources
- proactively create team-building action items and synergistic principles
- collaboratively build multifunctional imperatives
- seamless growth strategies for cost-effective functionality and human capital
Businesses who do not understand the value of investing in good writing post this nonsense on their websites, and likely in other communications pieces. A website is a window into a company. Yet too many companies present robotic nerds talking nonsense business jargon in the parlor.
Good communication, formal and informal, breathes and has a human rhythm. Words should be short. Phrases should be succinct. The message should be authentic and stick to the reader’s memory. It should awaken, alert, and inform. A business should feed a message to a reader like a pass in sports — direct, vibrant, and crisp.
In the chapter “Business Writing: Writing in Your Job,” from his book On Writing Well, William Zinnser recommends being “yourself when you write” for business. For company leaders, this means knowing your company and its branding and presenting it sensibly and like a human in your business-to-business and business-to-customer communications. “You will stand out as a real person among the robots,” Zinsser says.
When written communication isn’t a core strength of a business, that business must bring on board a professional writer or writing team who can present the company’s strengths clearly, avoiding nonsense jargon.
Writing in the Shadows: 15 Competencies of a Good Ghostwriter
By Melissa Walsh
In French, 'ghostwriter' is translated as 'écrivain dans l’ombre,' literally 'writer in the shadows.'
So you have a gripping story to tell and you’re confident that you have an audience waiting to hear what you have to say in the form of a book, essay or script. The problem is that you need help capturing your memories and knowledge into the written word.
Should you hire a ghostwriter?
In French, “ghostwriter” is translated as écrivain dans l’ombre, literally “writer in the shadows.” The ghostwriter writes a work on another’s behalf, or for another person who is presumed to be the author of the work. The person churning the prose at the computer is a phantom to the storyteller's readership.
If you're thinking about entering the shadows of freelance writers out there to find candidates for ghosting your prose, consider the following essential ghostwriting competencies:
- Subject-matter Competency — Choose a ghost who has a solid understanding in, or at least a strong aptitude for learning about, the topic or topics that have driven your ambitions and generated your story. For example, if you’re a professional athlete, choose a ghost with interest and knowledge about your sport.
- Editorial Competency — Your ghostwriter should be proficient in various writing styles and formats and know how to discern specifications for your market. Publishers and critics expect authors to develop nonfiction prose according to prescribed publishing industry style and format.
- Target Readership Familiarity — Commission a writer who is close to your fanbase or market. Ideally your ghost should be familiar with your audience.
- Publishing Biz Finesse — Choose a writer who understands the bottom-line concerns and motivation of publishers. In today’s market, your ghost should also have a working knowledge of writing for the structured-authoring environment, ensuring your manuscript can be published concurrently for print and digital platforms.
- Listening Power — Employing excellence in listening, a good ghost discovers the client’s story and presents it in the client’s voice. When interviewing writers to ghost your story, dismiss those with alligator qualities: tiny ears, large mouth.
- Research Integrity — Your ghost must approach research professionally, including focus, commitment, and accountability to discovering truth. You want a ghost who is a magnet for truth, an objective, scholarly type who relies on credible sources and who will be able to link every important factual detail in your manuscript to a verifiable source.
- Sense of Team — Commission a ghost who works well with others, who is candid but not offensive, friendly but not phony, polite but not distant. The craft of ghostwriting is much more than telling; it’s observing, discovering, documenting and communicating. When the aim is telling someone else’s compelling story, these activities cannot be done well in isolation.
- Collaboration — Find a ghost who not only is adept in writing, but who knows how to ghostwrite. There’s a difference. Ghostwriting is collaborating with you the storyteller, not controlling your story. The ghost is invisible in your story, with no trace of his or her voice, opinions, desires or goals ― only yours.
- Adaptation — The ghost does not have the freedom of the writer to create. They don't build your story, but rather carefully package your story. The ghost gathers the details of your story and projects them in your, the storyteller’s, voice and organizes them properly for the readership to receive the fully projected story. What’s more, the ghost does not market the story, but rather covertly (from the shadows) delivers it to the storyteller’s target audience.
- Time Management — Your ghost must work to a publication schedule. Project your publication date and work backwards, determining when the manuscript must be completed and delivered to the publisher. Work back further to determine deadlines for segmented deliverables beginning with the summary and outline of your story. Though your ghost may take the lead on scheduling deliverables, you must remain at the helm as the storyteller. Together, you and your ghosting partner must adhere to critical time management principles for completing the project.
- Humility — The ghostwriter is hidden from the work’s publicity and promotion, out of the limelight. The professional writer serving as a ghostwriter knows that it’s not their story to tell; it’s not their voice the audience wants to hear. It is your, the client’s, story and your voice. The ghostwriter is merely the hidden microphone projecting your story to your audience.
- Assertiveness — Humility is strength. It is not equal to passivity and not mutually exclusive to assertiveness. Commission a writer with a professional confidence that is neither aggressive nor arrogant, but rather assertive.
- Reliability — Seek a reliable ghost, a writer who consistently delivers quality content and is someone you can trust with projecting your story in your voice. In addition to the interview, thoroughly review the candidate’s portfolio and contact their references.
- Experience — Seek a ghost with some miles in their shoes, so to speak. Commission a writer who has experienced challenges in life. Essentially, you want a ghost who has lived enough to carry patience and wisdom into executing your storytelling project.
- Interviewing Sharpness — Through a process of interviews, your ghost will need to first discover your story before projecting it into publication. As interviewer, your ghost should be narrowly focused on you and your story. The right ghost to write your story will understand your need to tell it; they will zoom in on discovering details that define your story. They will be prepared for each interview and ensure that you are also prepared to discuss the particular story subtopic or time frame to be discussed. Your ghost should have done some background research in advance of each interview. And the interview should flow as a conversation, rather than a clinical note-taking session.
Your ghost will have a way of helping you feel comfortable telling your story. Though your ghost should be a well-prepared professional, they should not control the process. You must ultimately own your story’s discovery as its genuine, primary author.
Implementing a Strategy for Structured Content
By Melissa Walsh
Implementing a better way to manage enterprise content will benefit your enterprise both in significant cost-savings for managing current programs and generating new business.
So you're working out a strategy for empowering your organization with intelligent management of its content. You know that legacy content-management practices are insufficient for fast-paced projects that rely on and generate a great deal of content.
As you pitch your recommendations – perhaps to a room full of managers and engineers who are used to sifting through revisions of spreadsheets and powerpoint files saved all over network drives without little to no version-control and structure – prepare your arguments for structured-authoring and single-sourcing in content management as not only publishing best practices but also as bottom-line strategy for gaining workflow efficiency and achieving economies of scale.
Demonstrate how quality content equates to highly valuable enterprise assets ─ namely, content available for reuse and repurposing for multiple deliverable types and audiences. Then stress that, if these valuable enterprise assets are not findable, then your enterprise is incurring losses in resource time and assuming risk in submitting inconsistent, outdated, or incomplete documentation. Carefully planning for modular, topic-based, structured content up front and investing in tools to support required enhancements to content development processes and repositories are critical steps toward reducing lost time and rapidly responding to new opportunity. If you're wondering what I mean by "modular, topic-based structured content," think of chunks of reusable content being like lego pieces and how a copywriter might develop copy for a product's features from build of material documentation.
Methodology
Undertake a content strategy project according to a deliberate, planned process. Upon the acceptance of the recommendations presented in your business case, work out an enterprise content strategy as guided by a Content Working Group, or representatives from functional areas that develop and utilize enterprise content. The Content Working Group will help you define content needs and requirements.
Next, in collaboration with the Content Working Group, you'll launch a proof of concept for your proposed enterprise content solution:
- Identify and interview stakeholders.
- Establish implementation goals and milestones.
- Define a pilot project and the roles and responsibilities of the pilot team.
- Set up a schedule for pilot development and launch.
- Build the system (install tools, train resources, etc.)
- Convert legacy content.
- Deliver pilot batch of content in all desired publishing formats.
- Facilitate meeting with the pilot team on best practices and tweaks for enterprise roll-out.
- Build and deliver content following the new strategy, procedures, and tools.
- Capture project knowledge.
Your Content Working Group will examine how the strategy meets or falls short of meeting enterprise content needs. Each participant will contribute an understanding of their functional area’s content needs and how content is currently developed, maintained, distributed, and archived. A content-management SME/consultant will introduce the group to the technology and benefits of structured authoring. With that knowledge, the group will refine strategy for meeting particular content-management needs and achieving marked gains in efficiency. The group will evaluate and make recommendations for structured-authoring tactics, including:
- Translation (localization) savings, which is critical for global business
- Single-sourcing, enabling users to review and revise content in one place
- Content reuse methods for eliminating content development redundancy
- Structured authoring to reduce formatting time and fully utilize author expertise
- Versioning of single-source files with revision history and governance
- Minimalism to achieve concise content
- Specialization of topics and topic elements as required
- Format- and channel- agnostic publishing strategy
- Dynamic lists to push live-data (such as for parts and tools)
- Metadata to support ease of content archiving, retrieval, and conditional processing
- Conditional processing for the rapid build of content variations for special deliverables
- Modularity, or separating content from format to focus on concise and accurate content topic by topic
- Light-weight content management, or storing content in catalogued folders with rich metadata.
Enterprise Needs Assessment
Your enterprise Content Working Group will examine the current content management processes, or gaps in those processes, and survey content creators and users throughout the company. The needs assessment will address the following questions:
- How many content deliverables does the organization write or revise each year?
- What is the average length (wordcount) per deliverable?
- What percentage of this content is reused (copy & paste)?
- How many heads are dedicated to content generation?
- What percentage of time do content generators spend on formatting?
- What is the per-hour cost of content development?
- How many content pieces are localized each year?
- What is your vendor’s per-word rate for content translation?
- How many target languages, including the source language, do you deliver content in?
- How many different formats do you deliver documentation in (paper, PDF, mobile app, RTF, etc.)?
Structured-Authoring Must-Haves
The enterprise may select an XML-authoring tool for generating structured content. Here is what to look for when considering acquisition of an XML authoring tool*:
- How to create a new XML file, open an existing XML file, and modify and save an XML file
- Validation check of an XML file against a Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML schema on OPEN and SAVE commands
- DITA-awareness**
- The tool's publishing engine (such as a Java-script component)
- Translation-management support
- Workflow-management support
- Ease of use, such as WYSIWYG view
- Topic and topic-element templates (mitigating authors having to customize tags and code)
- A metadata menu meeting the enterprise needs
- Usability by authors and non-authors
- Review and approval modes
- Topic-mapping features and governance
- Simple and governed export.
CMS Must-Haves
Adobe, for example, offers a Web-based Component Content Management Solution (CCMS) for DITA-based content development, storage, and delivery. If your enterprise opts not to authorize purchase and use of a Web-based solution, here is what to look for when considering implementing a network-based CMS:
- Supports storing modular topic files and single-source authoring (write/revise in one file with multichannel output)
- Automatically updates a topic or topic map across deliverables
- Has search/retrieval capability and collaborative workflow features
- Offers native XML features (not just XML as a data type)
- Includes identifying status of files (such as where-used) and impact of a revision
- Shows version history and checked-in/checked-out status
- Compatible with the authoring tool of choice.
Your authoring tool should hook with your CMS. For example, Adobe AEM Guides provides easy, menu-based connectivity with CMS applications, including AEM and Microsoft SharePoint. Adobe offers a Publishing Server for ease of mapping topics within the CMS.
PLM
Check the specifications of your enterprise's Product Lifecycle Manager (PLM) ─ engineering suite of applications for managing assembly/parts information and product design changes ─ for connectivity with your CMS and XML authoring tool. XML export of layered model and parts files should flow into image and table elements of your content topic structure. Any current or recent PLM should be XML-ready and compatible for dynamic publishing to XML-based publishing applications. The Export function in Agile, for example, includes options for XML-data export; the application also allows import of XML-structured data. Your content lead should test the export of live PLM data to XML elements in XML authoring tool templates. Implementing a better way to manage enterprise content will benefit your enterprise both in significant cost-savings for managing current programs and generating new business. What’s more, eliminating manual rework and redundancies in internal documentation and external deliverables will improve the utilization of human resources, making them more available for technical innovation and productivity where their skills are most needed.
*MS Word does not meet these objectives, though presented as an XMLcompatible application.
**DITA is an XML data model used widely for developing structured, semantically rich content.
"Melissa is extremely approachable and an excellent team player." ~ Tara DiLaura, Namer & ISA Program Manager of International Program Office, GDLS
"The fusion of Melissa's expert-level knowledge and interpersonal skills creates a dynamic balance that all companies would benefit from, and should have on their team. ... If you are luck enough to have the chance to work with Melissa, do so! Your business unit and organization as a whole will improve, and once tangled knots/challenges will no longer exist." ~ Roy Smotherman II, Legal, Regulatory & Compliance Expert
Learn more about Melissa Walsh's publishing services.
© Melissa Walsh All rights reserved.
Credits:
Created with images by Bits and Splits - "Six Traits of Effective Writing" • Kiattisak - "Businessman receive email by laptop computer from customer, business contact and communication, email icon, email marketing concept, send e-mail or newsletter, online working internet network." • zef art - "A realistic dollhouse living room with furniture and window at night.,Artwork table decoration with handmade realistic dollhouse." • Mulad Images - "Colorful Plastic toy blocks isolated on white background.,Building Blocks" • Worawut - "Businessman hand drawn arrow up as step stair with business strategy icons on blue background, Business development strategy, Action plan and goal concepts, copy space" • dizain - "Content Strategy timeline, business concept"