HBR Guide to Better Business Writing - Bryan A. Garner 2013

Be plain-spoken: Avoid bizspeak
Developing your skills

It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.

Just kidding. Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice.

Back when journalists were somewhat more fastidious with the language than they are today, newspaper editors often kept an “index expurgatorius”: a roster of words and phrases that under no circumstances (except perhaps in a damning quote) would find their way into print. Here’s such a list for the business writer. Of course, it’s just a starting point—add to it as you come across other examples of bizspeak that hinder communication by substituting clichés for actual thought.

Bizspeak Blacklist

actionable (apart from legal action)

agreeance

as per

at the end of the day

back of the envelope

bandwidth (outside electronics)

bring our A game

client-centered

come-to-Jesus

core competency

CYA

drill down

ducks in a row

forward initiative

going forward

go rogue

guesstimate harvesting efficiencies

hit the ground running

impact (as verb)

incent

incentivize

impactful

kick the can down the road

Let’s do lunch.

Let’s take this offline.

level the playing field

leverage (as verb)

liaise

mission-critical

monetize

net-net

on the same page

operationalize

optimize

out of pocket (except in reference to expenses)

paradigm shift

parameters per

planful

pursuant to

push the envelope

putting lipstick on a pig

recontextualize

repurpose

rightsized

sacred cow

scalable

seamless integration

seismic shift (outside earthquake references)

smartsized

strategic alliance

strategic dynamism

synergize; synergy

think outside the box

throw it against the wall and see if it sticks

throw under the bus

turnkey under the radar

utilization; utilize

value-added

verbage (the correct term is verbiage—in reference only to verbose phrasings)

where the rubber meets the road

win-win

These phrases have become voguish in business—abstain if you can. Sometimes people use them to enhance their own sense of belonging or to sound “in the know.” Or they’ve been taught that good writing is hyperformal, so they stiffen up when they use a keyboard or pick up a pen, and they pile on the clichés.

It takes experience to bring your written voice into line with your spoken voice and to polish it so well that no one notices the polish.

Hunt for offending phrases

Start looking for bizspeak in all kinds of documents, from memos to marketing plans, and you’ll find it everywhere. You’ll eventually learn to spot it—and avoid it—in your own writing. You’ll omit canned language such as Attached please find and other phrases that only clutter your message.

Bizspeak may seem like a convenient shorthand, but it suggests to readers that you’re on autopilot, thoughtlessly using boilerplate phrases that people have heard over and over. Brief, readable documents, by contrast, show care and thought. Attached please find is just one example among many:

Writing plainly means expressing ideas as straightforwardly as you can—without sacrificing meaning or tone.

Take Warren Buffett again, one of the smartest business leaders on the planet—and someone, by the way, who cares a lot about good business writing. Consider how he rewrote a short passage that he found in a financial-services firm’s business prospectus. Read through the first excerpt before you read Buffett’s translation below it, and note the bizspeak phrases that landed on the cutting-room floor as Buffett tightened and translated:

NOT THIS:

Maturity and duration management decisions are made in the context of an intermediate maturity orientation. The maturity structure of the portfolio is adjusted in the anticipation of cyclical interest-rate changes. Such adjustments are not made in an effort to capture short-term, day-to-day movements in the market, but instead are implemented in anticipation of longer-term, secular shifts in the interest rates (i.e., shifts transcending and/or not inherent to the business cycle). Adjustments made to shorten portfolio maturity and duration are made to limit capital losses during periods when interest rates are expected to rise. Conversely, adjustments made to lengthen maturation for the portfolio’s maturity and duration strategy lies in the analysis of the U.S. and global economies, focusing on levels of real interest rates, monetary and fiscal policy actions, and cyclical indicators.

Words: 136

Sentences: 5 (All passive voice)

Average sentence length: 27.2

Flesch Reading Ease: 8.2

BUT THIS:

We will try to profit by correctly predicting future interest rates. When we have no strong opinion, we will generally hold intermediate-term bonds. But when we expect a major and sustained increase in rates, we will concentrate on short-term issues. And conversely, if we expect a major shift to lower rates, we will buy long bonds. We will focus on the big picture and won’t make moves based on short-term considerations.

Words: 74

Sentences: 5 (None passive voice)

Average sentence length: 14.8

Flesch Reading Ease: 60.1

If you analyze the before-and-after prospectuses under the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale—a test developed by readability expert Rudolf Flesch to measure the comprehensibility of written passages using word and sentence length—you can quantify the difference. The higher the score, the easier the passage is to read and comprehend. On a scale of 0—100, the original 136-word prospectus on top scores an 8.2. In contrast, Warren Buffett’s revision below it scores a 60.1. To give some perspective, Reader’s Digest scores 65 on the FRE scale, Time magazine around 52, and the Harvard Law Review in the low 30s. Increasing a passage’s readability is not the same as “dumbing it down.” The revised passage above gives the reader the same information—but more clearly.

Here’s a shorter example, this time from a community college’s mission statement:

NOT THIS:

The object of this enterprise is to facilitate the development of greater capacities for community colleges and not-for-profit neighborhood organizations to engage in heightened collaboration in regard to the provision of community services that would maximize the available resources from a number of community stakeholders and to provide a greater level of communication about local prioritization of educational needs with the particular community.

[63 words]

BUT THIS:

This project seeks to help community colleges and nonprofit neighborhood groups work more efficiently together.

[15 words]

In both the Buffett example and the community-college example, the original versions seem to be aiming at something other than getting the point across. Perhaps the writers wanted to sound impressive, or wanted to obscure what they were actually up to, or wanted to cover up the fact that they weren’t entirely sure what they were up to. Whatever the answer, the original styles won’t work on any target audience.

Recap

✵ Aim to write as naturally as you speak: Sound like a human being, not a corporation.

✵ Avoid boilerplate phrases that weigh down your language and suggest lazy thinking.

✵ Increase readability by expressing your ideas as directly as possible.