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February 26, 2009
When bad writing happens to good communicators
Yesterday my colleague Joe and I led a learning session with a client team. The day included a workshop on using storytelling to improve writing. To give the team an opportunity to practice, we provided an example of bad writing and invited the team to suggest ways to make the example better.
To create the example, Joe revisited a past project—announcing an initiative at a large corporation—and changed some of the facts, but otherwise left it as it was.
Here’s how it began:
[Name of initiative] is a major change initiative that began earlier this year. We’re writing to provide an update on this exciting initiative.
[Name of initiative] was launched in our largest division last summer to an enthusiastic response from all levels of employees. Since then, significant progress has been made toward implementing the initiative. These efforts include included:
• Launching pilot programs in various business units to test the usability of the process and tool (There were four more bullets along these lines.)
And here’s how it ended:
[Name of initiative] training is a three-part program with a focus on practical application and lessons learned from our pilot projects.
While we recognize how difficult scheduling can be, this training program is crucial to the successful implementation of [Name of initiative] across our entire company. If you haven’t already done so, please register for a workshop session as soon as possible. Thank you in advance for your participation and commitment to this initiative.
Our clients yesterday had trouble starting the exercise (to suggest ways to improve the announcement) because they couldn’t get over how bad the writing was.
“This is terrible!” said one. “How did this happen?”
And another team member asked us, “Did you work on this? It’s dreadful corporate speak that doesn’t say anything!”
Joe and I had to admit that, yes, in fact, we had worked this project. And the memories starting flooding back of how difficult it was to provide our initiative client with good advice.
There were lots of problems, but the major ones were:
- Initiative team members were in love with their own project. Hard as we tried, Joe and I couldn’t convince our clients that not all employees were interested in process details. The clients insisted we include all that junk.
- Team members were also very linear. So they had to communicate in chronological order, and couldn’t understand why we kept trying to put the news (or the action) up front.
- Whenever we tried to use simple language and construction, the clients edited our writing to “make it sound more impressive.” We fought many battles about corporate speak, and won only a small percentage of them.
The initiative announcement was a helpful bad example, but it was painful to remember how difficult it was to see our good work went bad.
Posted by Alison Davis at February 26, 2009 03:14 PM
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Comments
This is all too common when people are too internally focused and are more concerned with looking smart or explaining all their hard work than with being read or understood by their audiences. Simple communication takes hard work.
Posted by: Angelo at March 8, 2009 09:00 PM
That was nice. Thank you for sharing this one.
Posted by: JessicaPlala at May 10, 2009 12:19 PM