Musing On Communication Styles

Something that irritates and frustrates me an extraordinary amount is trying to read articles, presentations and other documents written with language that reads like a thesaurus that has suffered a catastrophic explosion all over the page.

Now, I don't claim to be good with the words. 'Cause I ain't.

But I can tell the difference between an easy-to-read document... and one that isn't. And if you have to attempt to put Humpty the Thesaurus back together again just to understand a single sentence, you are probably reading the English language equivalent of the midlife crisis/doof-doof sports car... a method of showing off and trying to be special and important and display some sort of bizarre superiority over the rest of your species, all the while not quite realising that you just look like a twat.

In my opinion, someone who can communicate intelligently with the written word can explain a complicted theory, thought, concept, idea, or whatever, with simple, concise terms in a small amount of words. If you think you are smart, but still can't get your message across in a simple way, then take your hand off it and stop trying to show off.

I appreciate that when writing about certain topics or focusing on specialist areas, linguistic gymnastics is a requirement... you can't necessarily explain fluid mechanics or electromagnetic theory with four and five letter words only. But even in complicated fields, there are always ways to dumb things down, and yet still get your message across.

Unfortunately, the practice of buzzword bingo is prevalent everywhere. And unfortunately, I've worked in one of the worst industries of all for this habit... management consulting. If you put "synergy", "leverage", "collaborative", "strategic" and a handful of other random words in a hat, and pulled out three of them, you would probably have the name of methodology that you could sell to clients. What I love about this theory of mine is that you can also apply it to the titles of movies starring Jean Claude Van Damme... in this case, try the buzzwords of "hard", "blood","sudden", "death", "impact", "double", "target", and... well, you get the picture. Try it yourself.

Anyway, what was I saying? The use of ludicrously complicated language is everywhere. I've worked in a number of industries over my few years in the work force...transport and supply chain, automotive, telecommunications, agribusiness, manufacturing and IT. And I studied engineering, mathematics and physics. Hah. I can't escape it. But what I have learned to value over these years is being able to recognise the skills of people who can explain complicated topics easily. Those people are the ones who actually get things done. And help manage others to get things done too. Those people who are too busy playing buzzword bingo are the ones who might seem intelligent on the surface, but dig a bit deeper (not very deep), and you realise, no one actually understands what the hell they are talking about. They're all just too afraid to admit it. And none of them actually ever get around to doing anything productive or useful. And in the end, that's what irritates me more than anything else.

Bored now.