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.
I have no objection to specialized knowledge and its attendant vocabulary. However, there is nothing specialized or academic in the article. It is merely composed of overly complex words and convoluted sentence structures to communicate a simple concept. The result is tedious and unnecessary.
To say it simply, I don’t mind technical language when it’s needed. But this article isn’t technical or academic. It just uses big words and complicated sentences to say something simple. It ends up being tiring and pointless.
Agreed! Actually, my comment was pertaining to what @krocnyc said about specialized vocabulary in general, not about the passage you shared.
Although one point about the passage you shared, in addition to its style: initialisms (like “CHROs”)/acronyms also tend to be harmful to comprehension.
I think one of these professions is “C-level executive” where the terms are calibrated to send the minions to sleep. At least that is my experience. Speaking as a minion.
The verbal… onslaught… the OP provided is the sort of thing I’m used to hearing spoken by our C-level team.
As an IT professional, I dream of one day getting them in a room and explaining a problem to them with my language full of technical terms, abbreviations (of course), and slang terms.
In the context of organizational social architecture, it is imperative that individual contributors are accorded a degree of discretionary latitude in the cultivation of interpersonal affiliations, concurrently supplemented by strategically curated enablement from Human Resources designed to optimize the qualitative impact of such interrelations. This necessitates that Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) architect and operationalize semi-structured relational frameworks that catalyze affective resonance and normalize reciprocal disclosure behaviors—thus incrementally constructing an emergent paradigm of synergistic interaction predicated upon anthropocentric collaboration models.
Accordingly, CHROs must delegate to employees the locus of control over the genesis and evolution of inter-employee relational networks. This empowerment not only facilitates a hyper-personalized modality for the construction and reinforcement of affective linkages but also incentivizes individuals to initiate and sustain connectivity congruent with their idiosyncratic relational schemas and preferential vectors. Through strategic alignment with executive communication stakeholders, CHROs can systematically scaffold and intensify the durability and functional utility of these intra-organizational connections. This recursive relational investment, in turn, potentiates the assimilation of employees into the broader cultural-communitarian identity of the institution through progressively intentional socialization mechanisms.
As a finance professional, I feel your pain. You want to provide your colleagues and the C-suite decision makers with the information they need, but you keep running into buzzsaws that take a chapter in a textbook to explain, often with Greek letters for which there is no plain English substitute.
Hmmm … maybe the indiscriminant use of nominalization—especially to create neologisms—is some kind of word crime, but it’s an essential part of word-formation in English as well as many other languages. I’d hate to think that I couldn’t use “happiness” or “destruction” in writing plain English.
Agreed—and good examples. I think the problem comes with, as you wrote, “the indiscriminant use of nominalization.” Sensible writing advice, in my opinion, tends to offer helpful suggestions rather than prescriptive rules.
Chinese writers have been relying on analogies for this purpose since the Axial Age.
Analogies are great for clarifying one particular thing, but bad for building a large, coherent system of thought. One would take pains to chain together 10 analogies, only to find the tenth incompatible with the first.
That was the curse of knowledge for (classical) Chinese philosophy. The system of analogies got progressively more confusing and hopeless as it grew larger over centuries.
One millennium after the Axial Age, Tang and Song writers moved to “return to the originals” and discarded much of the intellectual achievement in between. Another millennium after that, early 20th-century progressives declared Chinese philosophy insolvent.
Chinese philosophy remained bankrupt to this day. Although ancient Chinese mysticism (Taoism) and folk religion (Confucianism) have survived, they have been completely detached from the once vibrant pursuit for philosophical knowledge that impressed early Christian missionaries.
Internal terms and Three Letter Achronyms (TLAs) one of the first barriers which new hires have to navigate to feel like they are part of a company. Any half decent organisation will have a glassary somewhere which helps people pick up these things easily.
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.
I do not like corporate speak or Orwellian double speak, because the words communicate a whole lot of nothing.
I also think that both examples fail at communication depending on the audience. If the audience was for CHROs (I admit I do not know what this means) - then both examples are too couched in generalities to be useful.
What are specific actions CHROs need to do to provide better personal interactions ? Nothing should be obscured by generalities.
Of course I could be missing the context are the supporting text that makes this criticism invalid.
I hate corporate speak and similar gobbledegook as much as anyone, but one of the wonders of English (or any other language) is that it is so flexible and all-encompassing. You can express anything from a blunt instruction, to the inner workings of quantum physics. Of course, you can’t express everything in the same way: that’s where “plain, simple English” has its limits. To use your example, the jargon-filled piece you quoted was NOT talking about “friendships” at work, but something much more complex - working relationships in an organisation and how the organisation can benefit from allowing these to develop autonomously where possible. I agree that the piece could have been much better written, but simplifying it would lose some of the nuances and subtleties: there are resonances and implicit references at play. Similarly, if writer and intended readers are all in the same field, acronyms and jargon can have concise and precise meanings.
I would disagree (about that jargon/gobbledegook piece).
Rather than being precise and clear, it is obtuse, confusing, and serves no purpose other than a vague CYA (cover-your-butt) homage to the legal department.
I’m not sure English is the best language to express complex thoughts well, my experience in a few other languages is not sufficient to make reach that conclusion, but corporate jargon seems to posit the reverse - English is well-suited for written exposition devoid of any rationale meaning.
Both versions share an additional problem in that they rely too much on prepositional phrases. The arhuent woulf be clearer if the prepositional phrases were reduced, an the gramattical subject Ithe person or thing performing the action of the verb) and the main verbs were closer to each other.
The worst job I have ever had (and I’ve worked as an agrcut\tural laborer and on the line in a factory) was writing white papers for corporate types on the fringes of technology.
I wrote what they referred to as “Thought leadership.”
I wrote two primary versions; first, one that was clear and succint. Secondly, one sprinkled with jargon. The second is what they wanted.
I hated the job so much I resigned and wrote blog posts for 2.5 cents a word.
Two old but worth reading books:
Lanham, Richard A. [Style: An Anti-Textbook](https://Style: An Anti-Textbook).
Lanham,Richard A. Revising Prose Get a used copy for $10.00 or less; it’s good but ridiculously priced. There’s a business writing version called Revising Business Prose. The two mostly differ in the writing examples.
yeah, but the other side of dumbing down things is that the entire language gets dumbed down. That’s a tragedy. My issue is abbreviations. What the hell is a CHRO?
If you speak great French with a good accent, this means you have lived in France for a certain amount of time. If you speak great corporate speak, this means you have been in business environments for a certain amount of time.
As a non-english speaker there is the fact that you tend to use the language in the same way you are exposed to it, so you can be forgiven for that. But there is also the fact that by using this gobbledygook you seem to be more knowledgeable and have better chances to convince other people, specially when selling stuff. And that’s one’s fault.
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