91–100 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?"
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?
What about in the context of a sonar system on a submarine? My first encounter of the term was probably The Hunt for Red October.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 "Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist poppycock"
edit: Just checked and it still rates "Silly" x 75 as "Good". "Hemingway" x 30 rates as "Post-graduate" but otherwise good. Yeah, it's still broken.
I frequently refer writers to specific sections of this site when I edit their technical and marketing documents.
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?
Everyone of a certain age will have seen a half dozen submarine WW2 or Cold War films so regular people do have context.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
'Learnings' is an odd word but it actually makes sense because there are no perfect substitutes. 'Insights' isn't quite it.
This article explains how, but it doesn’t explain why: you should do this because it’s an accessibility issue. NHS Digital came up with a good example of this problem: https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and...
This can be a real issue, indeed.
It is one thing to speak to people in a language they will understand without judging. But it is another thing to simplify grammar and vocabulary too much in written technical documents that need to be precise.
One example is the push to use "plain English" in legal documents. As it happens, legal documents are highly technical and the wording is very important, with terms having an actual precise meaning.
There needs to be a balance.
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…
FWIW in UK 'must' in gov advice indicates a legal obligation. It annoys me no end when such obligations are not supported by references to legislation: as then I can't check if they've been correctly interpreted.
Prose should be readable, but also functional.
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.
If the aim is to get a point across, why use complicated words and sentences, when simple ones might be better understood? If an idea can be expressed in the same way with "Plain English", how would this make people 'congnitively simpler'?
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?"
Dunno, Ping me felt quite natural to me. It feels like a handy substitute for when there are multiple options for one person to contact another and person one does not care how he is contacted. As opposed to very formal communications that stick to email or mail. Ping me => email/call/slack/whatsapp/zulip/telegram/meet-in-person me
Language, specifically jargon, is an expression of culture. It's an expression of power, education, experience, or lack thereof. It's a quick way to gauge if someone is "like you" or not. If they have the same experience, and especially in professional settings, a quick (yet often incorrect) measure of competence.
Take everyone's favorite, "Business English":
You don't try again, you iterate. You don't take another call, you jump or hop to another call. You sync, and you align. Against the article's recommendation, you nominalize all day, by "bringing projects to completion" and "moving forward with the engagement".
Jargon and style, while often utter bullshit, is a way of measuring people quickly. I once had someone ask me, "would you say you practice disruptive innovation methodology?" My answer to that question was a quick way to learn that unlike them, I did not have an MBA. Complexity is often synonymous with education.
> Jargon is a type of language that is only understood by a particular group of people. You can use jargon when writing to people who will understand the terms and phrases. It can be a useful form of shorthand. But try to avoid using specialist jargon on the general public.
Unless your goal is to identify if someone is part of said particular group. And therefore in the vast majority of business and technical cases, Plain English -- at least jargon and nominalization -- unfortunately may close more doors than it opens.