North of the 49th | Amway

Earlier today I attended our mayor's State of the City breakfast. The highlight was a speech by the mayor outlining the hope and wishes of the city of London as we head into the future. Oddly enough, despite my recent post on hope — and the fact that this message was all about hope — it left me feeling somewhat empty.

The reason? The words. It was riddled with biz-speak and euphemisms, and while it sounded good, it came across like the majority of business communications.

Business communications — and also political rhetoric — are much like an Etch-a-Sketch. The picture may look pretty, but when you give it a good shake to get to the bottom of it, the design disappears, leaving only a blank slate behind. Business communicators can be the worst at this — messages of nothingness gussied up with pretty words and clichés designed to make it look like there's substance.

My favourite book of all time is Robertson Davies' Fifth Business. One part in particular that resonated with me was the main character's belief in "plain speech" — something he learned from his father, a newspaper man. This is where business communications — and communications in general — should be going. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck going the other way.

Instead, we'll read corporate documents, CEO speeches, and press releases filled with words like proactive, leverage, facilitate, deliverables, resources, and — my personal favourite — paradigm shift. Why is this? What's wrong with saying what you need to say in a way that's clear, concise, and accessible to all? 

Maybe it starts with our schooling, where quantity is valued over quality. Think about those essays you had to write when you were younger (or are in the process of writing). Why were we told to write 3,000 words? Why was the mandate not to highlight three or four key ideas? Why stretch a point by 1,000 words when the same concept could easily be illustrated in far less?

Or maybe, just maybe, we're afraid to appear common. Big words equal big brains, right? Why say, "We're going to do this so our company can make more money," when you could say, "Our corporate philosophy going forward is to create an environment where action and creativity are fostered in such a manner as to affect change in a manner that facilitates growth and development,"?

I admit, I've succumbed to this temptation in the past. Moving out of newspapers, my early communications days were spent in medical writing. So I filled my prose with empty words that would look good to my learned readership. But which master was I serving? Did the doctors and pharmaceutical execs reading my articles really want this, or was I just feeding my ego and a need to be seen as intelligent — justifying that selfish need using the target audience as my excuse? And in the process, how many people did I alienate, sending them scurrying for a dictionary just to understand concepts (or products and treatments) that may have provided them with a very real benefit?

Slowly I began to see the light. And my greatest epiphany came during a conference with Ragan Communications. One of the exercises was to write a paragraph, using all these biz-speak words, while saying as little as possible. I went on for a page-and-a-half.

Since then, I've tried to deprogram myself. What I've realized is that business communications isn't about sounding smart, or using big words; it's about reaching the end-user and giving them what they need. I hope that my writing style is appealing to those who read it. I hope it informs and, where applicable, entertains. When I write speeches for others, I try to use their voices — not enforce mine or enforce the use of a bunch of jargon and big words. I want to be honest in my writing, open, transparent, and clear.

But now I find myself increasingly agitated by business communications. I find myself distracted by superfluous words (and no, superfluous is not superfluous!!!), I find myself trying to decode what they're not saying. And, when it comes to political speeches, I find myself getting irritated by these empty words that are just designed to hide the truth and fill that void with substantive nothingness (hey — I just invented that term! But it fits; a weighty nothing to fill the vacuum left by the removal of something).

And here's why I love things like this Opportunity Zone. Yes it's corporate, yes there are business-related comments, but it's real. It's actual people writing actual words and putting their own faces and names behind it. It's not some nameless, faceless communicator (uhm, like me…) writing words for others, or on behalf of an identitiless corporation.

That said, my goal is to bring more of the former into the latter. I hope I've been able to do that in the articles, ad copy, and product copy that I write; and in the speeches that I pen for others. I try to infuse them with honesty and personality. And I try to avoid double-speak at all costs. I do my best to ensure that words like proactive, leverage, and their ilk won't appear in my copy. I try to be honest.

Let's go back to the mayor's speech today, it was probably written by a team of writers (problem A), vetted by a bunch of administrators (problem B), and then edited to make it sound personable (problem C). What was left was a lot of emptiness. The thing is, if she had just spoken from the heart, written a speech that sounded like the way she talks to her husband or friends, then that emptiness, which surrounded this message of hope, would have been filled with something so much more valuable to her audience.

Soul.