Writing gone bad: How to sound like a complete nitwit
Captured in the wild, and example of ad copy so bad it may make you want to wash your eyes out with soap:
“Our expertise in On Demand Business can help you cope with an ultradynamic marketplace by developing an innovation-driven strategy which increases agility as it blunts commoditization. We can even help you better execute your strategy in play.”
This was spotted by Mike McLaughlin in an ad in the Wall Street Journal, but it looks as if it could have been created by the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Mike commented that he has no idea what the sentence means. If you ask me, it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s supposed to fool us into thinking it means something important. After all, it has all those important-sounding words in it.
Guess what, guys. Stringing together a bunch of polysyllabic words does not a coherent sentence make. As Mike asks:
In a face-to-face meeting with a client, would you say anything like the nonsense in that ad? I doubt it. Then why write that way?
Why indeed. People want to have a conversation with you. If you’d actually say something like “developing an innovation-driven strategy which increases agility as it blunts commoditization”—with a straight face—in a conversation, then you need professional help.
Roy Jacobsen
in Writing in its natural habitat, Word Choice, Elsewhere on the Web
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Reader Comments (1)
Hard to fathom, but there it is.
Worse, I've had to edit material that reads like that--<i>and not been permitted to change it.</i>
Well, ya gotta eat, after all--the blues notwithstanding.