Search and Destroy Your Corporate Gobbledygook

Your corporate gobbledygook is killing your copywriting.

Mumbo jumbo. Bafflegab. Gibberish.

Those are great words. You know what’s not a great word? Solution. Not if you’re selling software. You want a better word than “solution” for software? Try “software.”

If you’re using words that normal people don’t use—or worse, if they have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re doing it wrong.

The same applies to novelists, by the way. Fiction writers should write with the words they use in their heads every day. That way they’ll be sure to use the words that everyone else uses in their heads every day. Novelists who consult a thesaurus for every second or third sentence to find words that aren’t in everyone’s heads barf up inpenetrable prose that gives the rest of us headaches.

Likewise, when corporate gobbledygook creeps into your copywriting, it’s time to go on a search and destroy mission.

Want a longer example? Here’s Sarah Mitchell over at Global Copywriting:

Are you a leading provider of innovative, cost-effective solutions with world-class service and a unique portfolio of robust products? Are you pleased to announce a next-generation partnership to become an industry leader in quality assurance to optimise customer satisfaction? Are you focused on flexibility, scalability and high-performance outcomes? I hope not. I really hope not.

Most of the words in that paragraph are gobbledygook.

“From a business perspective,” she adds, “they’re so overused they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Our hat is off to Sarah for bringing this problem to everybody’s attention, but she accidentally did it herself.

That phrase. “From a business perspective.” It’s also corporate gobbledygook.

It means nothing and it’s structurally kludgy.

Here’s a new and improved sentence: “They’re so overused in business they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Those of us in the business world have heard the phrase “from a [blank] perspective” so many times that we sometimes forget it means nothing. “From a business perspective.” “From a finance perspective.” “From an IT perspective.” “From a marketing perspective.”

Its awkwardness is so familiar we hardly even notice it anymore.

We forget it sounds awful and weird and forced and just…wrong to everyone else.

We don’t mean to pick on Sarah here. Really, we don’t. She just absorbed that cringe-worthy phrase like the rest of us. Using it is a habit, like saying “he was like” instead of “he said.”

It’s sort of okay if you talk that way (nothing bad will happen to anybody, at least), but for goodness sake don’t write that way.

The folks at Mule Design created what they call the Unsuck It tool that transforms sucky language into language everyday people can tolerate.

“Going forward” should be replaced with “in the future.”

In finance, “spend” should be replaced with “spending.” Spend is a verb, not a noun. Slang is okay in the office, but keep it out of your copywriting.

“Leverage technology” should be replaced with “use technology.”

We could do this all day. David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now compiled a list of 325 examples of gobbledygook words and phrases that he found over and over again in 711,123 corporate press releases.

Maury Maverick coined the word “gobbledygook” in 1944 when he was a U.S. Representative in Texas. He wrote a mock-threatening memo banning nonsense language and declared that  “anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.”

We won’t shoot you if you write, “from a call center perspective, we’re trying to optimize customer satisfaction going forward,” but we guarantee that hardly anyone will read past that sentence.

So knock it off already. You’re only hurting yourself.