Write It Well

MBA students’ … writing and presentation skills have been a perennial complaint. Employers and writing coaches say business-school graduates tend to ramble [and] use pretentious vocabulary.

•

Many businesspeople hold on to very bad writing habits from our school years.

As students, most of us tried using rambling prose to make papers long enough. Most of us also tried using pretentious vocabulary to compensate for skimpy homework.

Both  tactics can be disastrous in business writing. Countless times at Write It Well, businesspeople have told us they want to read clear, concise documents that get straight to the point.

•

•

•

For entire chapters on clarity and concision in business writing, see our book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Please e-mail Write It Well or call us at (510) 655-6477 to find out how our customized trainings and line of books can help your organization and all its writers communicate more clearly and concisely.

Or if you have an important document that you don’t feel confident sending out, our editors can help you deliver your message effectively in prose that feels effortless to read.

•

In a memo this week, Standards Editor Phil Corbett of the New York Times asked the organization’s writers to avoid the word tweet in most news articles. (A tweet is a message on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Corbett’s rationale is that at the Times,

we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” – as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three….

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords…. let’s look for deft, English alternatives [to "tweet"]: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

In this case, we disagree with the words “jargon” and “deft.” Whether a word is jargon can depend on audience knowledge. We do advise against using recently coined words like tweet without a definition if your readers are unlikely to know them. But it doesn’t take much space to explain that “A tweet is a Twitter post” or that “Tweeting means writing on Twitter.”

The noun tweet is one short word. In comparison, “Twitter message” and “Twitter update” are unnecessarily long, formal, and clumsy phrases. We find it more deft and concise to define the word tweet and then use it freely.

•

Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

Retweeting is when a Twitter user clicks a link to add someone else’s tweet to their own Twitter stream. (A tweet is a post on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Retweeting is a way of telling your own Twitter followers, “This tweet is worthwhile.” The “RT” letters at the start of the following Twitter post are a signal that Mary Cullen (M_Cullen) retweeted  (RTed) the following post by Jason Fried (jasonfried):

RT @jasonfried: Jargon is insecurity.

At Write It Well, we’re big fans of plain English over jargon. Jargon in business writing can be a sign of insecurity, or a way to overinflate a simple message to make it look more substantial.

We also admire concise writing. If M_Cullen hadn’t RTed jasonfried’s tweet, we would have missed this pithy, well-phrased statement.

•

Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

When I was eight, I asked my brother what ASCII meant. “ASCII is a secret military code. I’ve managed to break it,” he said, “and I read their plans to kidnap you.”

Like many other tech terms, ASCII is an unclear acronym, easily confusing businesspeople and eight-year-olds alike. My brother was partially right — it’s a simple code for representing letters, punctuation marks, and digits as ones and zeroes. It stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and people pronounce it “asky”. It’s far from secret.

“Cloud computing” is a much newer term. It refers to web-based applications like Google Mail, where data and software live in a network somewhere, and not on your hard drive. For definitions of these and other tech terms, check out Hewlett Packard’s list of baffling IT terms.

If you’re unsure about the meaning of a catchy new tech term, chances are good your readers will be uncertain, too. Because technology grows so quickly, it spawns new words at a breathtaking speed. Many of these words are useful, but until they’re widely known it’s helpful to clarify their meanings for your reader.