The Language of Business Embraces Confusion Over Clarity

On the wall to my cubicle in the Business Journal office is a nearly four-year old press release about a Texas company buying a funeral home and memorial park in Camarillo. Carriage Services Inc. identifies itself as a publicly traded “death care” company and the expansion into Southern California was part of a strategy to get into markets “with positive long-term demographic trends.” First off, I never knew there was a death care industry. But if there’s a health care industry, why not have the opposite? But what caught my eye was the sentence about “positive long-term demographic trends.” In other words there are a lot of old people here who are going to die soon and need a place to be buried. Not in a cemetery but a memorial park. That example shows all that is wrong with press releases: they are muddled, confusing and contain jargon that means nothing. Canned quotes in releases never read like how people actually talk. If I were to describe my job in press release-speak I would stop being a reporter for a print newspaper and website and instead become a content provider whose stories get leveraged across pulp-based and electronic platforms. Companies big and small spend millions in salaries to people whose job it is to communicate with the public yet have no objection when the message is not clear. When writing how their employer is a “world class full service vertically integrated solutions provider” they probably have no more idea of what that means than the person reading it. As the reporter on the receiving end of these press releases it becomes my job to translate this muddled and confusing language into something understandable. Sometimes it isn’t easy. I cannot count how many times I’ve read a release multiple times, not understood a word of it, and tossed it into the recycling bin. Certain words and phrases used again and again are aggravating, with the aforementioned “solution” at the top of the list. No reporter should ever use the word “solution” as it gets used in the business world. Forbes.com agrees. In December the online magazine did a feature titled “The Most Painfully Annoying Business Jargon.” “Solution” made the list, cited as “the epitome of lingual laziness.” So did “full service” and “manage expectations” and “take it to the next level.” A disservice Burying your message in jargon and corporate-speak does a disservice to the company trying to communicate with its clients and customers. For the people who write this gibberish day in and day out it becomes second nature to the point that they talk like flesh and blood press releases. A case in point was the spokesman for ITT, a major aerospace and defense contractor that is closing its Lancaster manufacturing facility. You wouldn’t know that he was talking about real people losing their jobs by explaining how the company came to its decision after looking at “footprint rationalization and headcount rationalization.” Huh? An aerospace manufacturer here in the Valley wouldn’t make their president available for a recent story on the NASA budget and instead provided a prepared statement stripped of any humanity. The company was concerned about the future direction of NASA and its deferral of “significant development and production activities for a specific architecture.” On the phone with a company spokesman I asked if “specific architecture” referred to the Constellation program, for which this company was building rocket engines. Yes, he said. So why not just say that? I asked back. “Because we’re engineers,” he responded. I didn’t have the presence of mind to point out that I wasn’t an engineer and that most of the Business Journal’s readers are not engineers. Really, who are they trying to impress with phrases like “production activities for a specific architecture?” The why behind the clutter It’s all about vanity, suggested William Zinsser, an author, lecturer and consultant hired to “dejargonize” corporations and government agencies. His” On Writing Well” is among the books I return to again and again. In the chapter about writing in the workplace, Zinsser explained executives use big but meaningless words to make them appear important and knowledgeable in front of their peers. “Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind,” Zinsser wrote. “Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.” Amen to that. It is advice corporate communication departments and p.r. firms should take to heart. So should the reporters on the receiving end of the releases that more often than not lack a simple style. Typing up whatever a company sends serves no purpose to either reporter or reader. I’ve done panel discussions for public relations professionals during which I chant the mantra of simplicity. In creating guidelines for the daily updates posted on the Business Journal website, many of which are rewritten press releases, it is clearly stated to get rid of the jargon and corporate-speak and make the update simple and easy to understand. Neither effort produced the desired result but there is always hope that one day “solutions provider” and “full service” and their brethren of annoying corporate jargon will find peace in a plot in a memorial park. No, make that a cemetery. Staff Reporter Mark Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or by e-mail at [email protected]. He sincerely apologizes if there was anything muddled or confused in this column.