The Business Speak Blacklist

A great article from Bryan Garner over at Harvard Business Review on removing business jargon from your writing. As Bryan writes:

It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.

Just kidding.

Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice.

He even provides a list of words and phrases to avoid.

Maybe we should add a “Jargon Alert” to Mimiran to warn you if you’re using them in your proposals?

 

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