81–90 of 327 posts
English vs. business English. Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking. Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh. "Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'. "Ping me" - ugh. And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"
Every place I've worked with managers that speak like this has invariably produced crap.
English vs. business English. Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking. Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh. "Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'. "Ping me" - ugh. And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"
Ping me => email/call/slack/whatsapp/zulip/telegram/meet-in-person me
English vs. business English. Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking. Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh. "Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'. "Ping me" - ugh. And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"
I personally love "ping me". It's even shorter and more punchy, compared to "message me".
Language evolves. Shakespeare would find our English today bewildering. Instead of complaining about it, I find it most helpful to keep up with the latest lingo, and focus instead on conveying my message most clearly.
I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose? Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
Writing clearly is like playing Tetris. Sentences should be presented with clauses that drop down and slot together efficiently. At the earliest available opportunity you drop in a block that completes the line and points are won/made. This can also make for rather dull writing and I appreciate the irony in this paragraph: > However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when…
Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer. "You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445." "You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead." "If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill…
Funny to read this as I'm learning German! In German the main verb of a sentence has to be at the end depending on the context (e.g: if it is a question, or following some prepositions such as "dass").
Let's say we want to build a question, it will be constructed this way:
1. question marker (such as "Was", "Wo", "Warum", etc)
2. subject
3. other details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.
Other times, like when people write to demonstrate nuanced expertise, or to connect with a specific audience, or to place themselves apart from a specific audience, or to entertain, delight, uplift, transcend, prod, annoy, or console, Plain English can be too plain.
Heres a great list from GOV.UK of the kind of words to avoid when using Plain English: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...
Obviously gov.uk material is of a different nature than that of a corporate motto, but it speaks to the exasperate community complaints at that time.
More info: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-languages/yVTGZS-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last one requires keeping the first clause of the first sentence in your head; just because you've split sentences doesn't mean you've avoided that, because “otherwise” imports the conditional in the previous sentence by reference and then inverts it. To actually avoid requiring the reader to keep sentence parts in their head, use if-then or do-if constructs, but not if-then-else constructs. “Complete form 445 i…
That's a bad example of how to express age limits. If I've just had my 60th birthday, or perhaps today is my birthday, which applies, or do I have to fill in both forms? Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at the time the form is received, that matters? Arguably that's a problem with the rule itself rather than how it's expressed. It's better if you can write something like: "If you were born be…
Imprecise language to allow flexibility and 'let the judges decide'... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with common-law-inspired regulation.
Not sure how to do this better though.
English vs. business English. Pre-boarding is just boarding. Pre-booking is just booking. Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh. "Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'. "Ping me" - ugh. And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"
“Ping me” really threw me for a loop the first time I heard a non-tech say it in an obvious non-tech way. It literally has no other meaning outside of the ICMP echo utility; and the onomatopoeia of hitting glass. How did it enter the Business world?