Cultivating Cromulent Corporate Communication

Poor corporate communication is so ubiquitous that it has almost become a cliché in itself. The Internet abounds with articles and memes about buzzwords, “corporate speak,” and “garbage language.” This is unfortunate on many levels. Clearly from the perspective of the company, poor corporate communication is counter-productive; it muddies the message and can even have the opposite effect than the one desired. Either the intended message is not conveyed or the company undermines their message by seeming unprofessional.

As a linguaphile, I find poor corporate communication frustrating. However, as a translator and interpreter, I also have a vested interest in clearer corporate communication; if the source text is unclear, it becomes difficult to convey a clear message in the translation without the risk of departing from the original author’s intended meaning. The problem of clarity of message is exacerbated for interpreters, because it is often impossible to ask the speaker for clarification — but at least the orator has the excuse of the difficultly of public speaking; it is very difficult for most people to express themselves clearly and eloquently on the fly — especially in front an audience. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to speak thoughtlessly may be regarded as unfortunate; to write thoughtlessly looks like carelessness.”

So, how can one explain the prevalence of sloppy corporate communication? In his 1998 paper, “The roots of poor corporate communication,” Edmond H. Weiss says that “[m]uch poor corporate writing and speaking stems from the desire to package and present information in a more favorable light than it deserves.” In other words, he claims that a lot of bad writing is underpinned by an intention to deceive. There must be an element of this — what student has not resorted to filler and padding to mask their lack of research — but this is not the whole story. Good writers are able to craft a well-formed turn of phrase even if they have nothing to say (just look at what ChatGPT is capable of!), and everyone knows that a gifted salesman can be convincing even when bending the truth.

In my experience, a bigger problem is writers’ over-reliance on jargon and in-house terms. In “The Sense of Style,” Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker discusses “the Curse of Knowledge: a difficultly in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” If you have expertise in a specific field and you are writing for laypeople, you need to make a concerted effort to put yourself in their position, adapt your language, and maybe even define your terms.

Writer Iona Italia talks about a similar problem in academic writing, which she laments as being “turgid, tedious and obscure.” In the case of academia, however, Iona describes the situation as a tragedy of the commons, in which academic writers are incentivised to use what Pinker refers to as the “self-conscious style” because it shows that they are familiar with the codes of their field. Thus, academic writers are not first and foremost seeking to produce new knowledge, but rather signalling to their peers that they are a valued member of the group. This is a tragedy in another sense because, as Iona says, “clear, precise, succinct writing is a public good.”

Another field where clear writing would be a public good, but is sorely lacking, is the law. There is even a term that refers to the formulaic writing style and archaic vocabulary so typical of legal English: legalese. A full understanding of legal codes and case law is difficult enough to acquire; it is hard to escape the feeling that the persistence of legalese is purely a gate-keeping mechanism to ensure that laypeople will always require lawyers’ secret knowledge to draft a contract or decipher a brief.

According to New York magazine’s literary critic, Molly Young, the phenomenon is even worse within companies: she says that the purpose of the stereotypical “garbage language” used in meetings and memos is actually to impede communication. My intuition is that speakers adopt this pseudo-technical language mostly because they believe it lends them a certain air of competence and belonging; like in academia, signalling seems like a much more parsimonious explanation than obfuscation.

The stakes generally aren’t as high in corporate communication as in the academic or legal fields, but I would argue that clear writing in any field is a public good, and although the causes are almost certainly multi-factorial, it is important to understand them where possible. The influence of text messages and Twitter's character limits is often cited as a reason for the decline in literacy, but I tend to believe that the impact of texting and Twitter is overblown; the use of abbreviations in text messages for the sake of brevity and speed does not prevent one from learning how to write.

I believe that the main reason there is so much poor writing is simple: too little attention is paid to writing clearly. I am not advocating the pedantic attitude of “grammar Nazis”, but writing is a craft that you need to work on. It is difficult to make a persuasive argument or convince someone of your expertise if you lack a basic understanding of syntax and punctuation. Moreover, it is not because you are intelligent that you can necessarily write well, and it’s not just about what you learn in school; there has been much hand-wringing about the decline in students’ written English and our failing educational systems, but learning good writing skills is a lifelong effort and, as Michigan University Professor Patrick Barry says, to write good sentences, you need to read good sentences.

Finally, I believe that the constant time pressure and fractured attention that are synonymous with the modern workplace impair most people’s ability to write clearly, even if they are capable of it. It takes time to craft a clear and compelling message, even if your grasp of grammar is impeccable, but who has time to tweak and edit their copy 10 times? We all have deadlines to meet. And yet it is a fallacy to believe that you can just sit down at your computer and pump out a perfectly formed 2000-word essay. You need to understand who you are writing for, what they know, and what they expect from the text. You need to provide the necessary context yet omit needless words and avoid pointless throat clearing. And most of all, you need to read it, re-read it, reorganise, rephrase, and ask yourself, "is this clear"?