Why do business writers insist on obscuring the simple meaning of something with such Gobbledygook? I’m probably just being curmudgeonly, but I grow weary of what often comes across as pretentious.
From an article in FASTCOMPANY:
Employees should have autonomy when it comes to building personal connections, as well as guidance from HR on how to make the most of their interactions. That requires CHROs to foster guided interactions that engender interpersonal cohesiveness and naturalize sharing behavior, which establishes a new, more human-centered set of collaboration norms.
CHROs should give employees ownership of building their connections with one another. Not only does this promote personalization of how they strengthen these relationships, it also encourages them to make connections according to their own needs or preferences. CHROs can help employees fortify these peer connections over time in partnership with communication leaders. In turn, they can grow employees’ connection with the organization’s culture and community through socialization.
In plain English:
Employees should be able to build friendships at work in their own way, with a little help from HR on how to make the most of those connections. HR leaders can support this by creating simple ways for people to spend time together and share openly, helping to make work relationships more natural.
Employees should be able to build relationships in ways that work best for them. HR and communication teams can back them up by finding ways to make those connections stronger over time. This will help employees feel more at home in the organization’s culture.
As an education leader, one of the things that I promote with our academic teams is teaching students to write plainly and convincingly. Perhaps this is an area where artificial intelligence could be a helpful editor.
I spent decades as a consultant advising senior management. Advice written in brief, with plain language, was guaranteed to be read and considered. Everything else was ignored. The best way to ensure the CEO will never invite you back is to write or speak gobbledygook. (The exception to the rule was HR management )
It did strike me as sounding a lot like AI, but there is so much of it now that it is getting difficult to know what a person wrote or was AI assembled.
Plain English, even better Plain UK English, is vital for comms.
Dependent on your organisation the average reading and understanding levels of your staff could be at that of a high schooler or even a college student.
On a related note, I’ve always advised my friends to never take a job with a job title and responsibilities description that your Grandma wouldn’t understand.
Pragmatic reason: Those jobs are usually the first to get fired in a rif.
This is the norm for many of us stuck in large corporations, sadly. Friend of the show, Brett Terpstra, recently released a “corporate ipsum generator” to assist in filling templates with content that looks plausible. All in Markdown, naturally.
I’m not here to defend Gobbledygook! But … some professions do rely on a specialized vocabulary where particular terms have a carefully calibrated and generally accepted meanings within that profession. We all have a general understanding of what “autonomy” means, but the term may have more precisely defined contours within the behavioral sciences.
And that’s fine when the behavioral scientists (or HR professionals) are talking amongst themselves. The trick is to convey the concepts with clarity and precision when writing for people outside of the profession.
That being said, the quoted text made my eyes glaze over.
It’s well worth reading, like much of Orwell, but I’ll put in a recommendation for a delightful critique of the six rules for writing Orwell prescribes in that essay: “How to Write English Prose” (2022) by David Bentley Hart
The challenge of communicating what you know to those who don’t know what you know has been described as “the curse of knowledge.” In particular (as someone who teaches academic reading and writing…), I find the tendency to use specialized jargon to be detrimental to communication outside of one’s field of expertise.
Steven Pinker suggested the curse of knowledge is “the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose” in a 2014 essay. And I love this XKCD comic: “Average Familiarity”
While I can’t say exactly why people write this way, I can point out that one reason it feels like this is the regular use of nominalizations, or “zombie nouns,” described here by Helen Sword in her book The Writer’s Diet:
When you turn a verb into a noun by adding a suffix such as ment or tion (confine → confinement; reflect → reflection), you sap its core energy. Likewise, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (suspicious → suspiciousness) or a concrete noun (globe → globalisation) tends to lack substance and mass, like a marrowless bone. That’s why nouns created from other parts of speech, technically known as ‘nominalisations’, are colloquially called ‘zombie nouns’: they suck the lifeblood from potentially lively prose.
but I grow weary of what often comes across as pretentious.
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