When writing for any audience, the number one priority must be to make your meaning clear. You will achieve clarity and impact when you keep your use of words down, rather than taking flight into lengthy descriptions. There is a tendency these days to use more words not less, which serves to complicate the meaning rather than clarify it. At its worst, this extends into what is known as ‘management gobbledygook’.
Madeline Grant, writing in the Telegraph, comments that gobbledygook thrives in politics, where it feels deliberately alienating and often conceals threadbare ideas. Political newspeak often softens or removes accountability for decisions, just as HR managers favour ‘offboarding’ over ‘sacking’ someone. In one of her excellent articles, Madeline quotes an MP who asked a minister about how to: ‘Up ambition in the implementation of the Procurement Act so we have the data, the skills and the digital tools to drive a more mission-driven and economically transformative commissioning across the government’. Take a deep breath before you can say you understood this! Word salad like this is clearly designed to conceal rather than illuminate …
A good place to start making your meaning clear would be avoiding the use of two words, when one word will suffice. Here are a few examples of unnecessarily bolstering a word with another that have been spotted in the media –
- Return back
- Progress forward
- Forests of trees
- Other alternatives
- Continue on
- Evacuated out
- Speeding too fast
- A human person
- Reiterate again
- Two twin towers
- Very unique
Less is mostly more! The fact that politicians (and others in authority) appear incapable of saying what they mean should concern us all.
