THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2006
Beware the ladder's middle rungs
One of my favorite passages in "Writing Tools" describes the efforts of an elementary school to draft a mission statement. Teachers at the school had dedicated themselves to writing instruction. Here's what I wrote:
During a workshop there, I asked the principal if the school had developed a mission statement. She sent a helper to fetch a fancy, laminated page:
Our mission is to improve student achievement and thereby prepare students for continued learning in middle school and high school. This learning community will accomplish this mission by developing and implementing world class learning systems. Alignment will be monitored by continual application of quality principles and responsiveness to customer expectations.
I'm not making this up. I've got the original in my office if you'd like to see it. How did it wind up in my office? In an act of vigilante dedication to good writing, I stole it. Before long, the principal sent me a little card with the new mission statement, this one free of jargon and numbing bureaucratic language. It reads: Our mission: learning to write, writing to learn.
Here's the tool, taught to me by the great writing teacher
Carolyn Matalene:
When climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction, beware of the middle rungs.Among journalists, those who speak or write in the bloodless language of bureaucracy become the objects of disdain and ridicule, as a recent link I caught on
Romenesko reveals.
It goes to a press release from Belo Corp., written on a day when many staffers of
The Dallas Morning News would be leaving the paper as a result of a buyout:
Belo is intensely focused on the right allocation of resources enterprise-wide, building up necessary competitive capabilities, and maintaining marketing and new product investments, while reducing costs wherever possible. Thus far in 2006, Belo has eliminated more than 200 positions company-wide, with approximately 30 of these reallocated to more Internet-centric roles. We've reduced overall employment and other operating expenses by more than $21 million on an annualized basis, including The Morning News' projected savings related to the voluntary severance program.
It's hard to imagine what a candid translation of this text might look like:
This business is getting tougher and tougher. If we want to compete, take advantage of the Internet, create new products, the money has to come from somewhere. It's as simple as this: We need to save $21 million dollars a year, and we thought that buyouts would be easier on everyone than layoffs.
To help us all recognize the quicksand of bureaucratic language, my old pal
John Walston has compiled "
The Buzzword Dictionary
," published by
Marion Street Press. (If you want to buy the book from Amazon.com, just click on the title proceed to the checkout, and Poynter gets a small cut of the profit as an Amazon associate.) The subtitle promises "1,000 phrases translated from pompous to English."
This lexicon offers a seemingly endless list of numbing words and phrases, from "congestion pricing" to "topic tiling"; from "interdependent partnering" to "reverse telecommuting." That said, the book also introduced me to words that were more lively than buzzy.
"Prairie dogging," for example, describes the habit of office workers to poke their heads out of their cubicles at the same time. "Snowplows" are the early adopters of a new technology. Of course, what makes these phrases almost delightful is that they work as metaphors. The prairie dog and the snow plow are images that we can see -- and understand.
Posted at 11:20:58 PM
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