Have mercy on the thesaurus

The torrent of bad writing has left a graveyard of once-valid, now-cliché words in its wake. In the California Gold Rush of 1848 and 1849, thousands of people tore through rock and stream to find any speck of gold their prospecting neighbor up the stream left behind. In the late 1990s, the American English Thesaurus became a similar victim of pillaging.

Suddenly, plain English wasn’t good enough. Use was replaced by utilize, company was made obsolete by enterprise and the use of acronyms—the ultimate achievement in euphemistic writing—was suddenly so fashionable you could invent them on the fly and people would almost applaud. This swath of abuse sent dozens of useful but relatively uncommon words crashing down into a pit of clichédom. Couple this with the invention of new words (seriosity) and the trend of ridiculous modifiers (world-class), and we suddenly have a template for how not to write.

Following are a few words that have had their character ground away by unrelenting use (or is that utilization?):

2. Erin Kissane, “Attack of the Zombie Copy,” A List Apart, October 24, 2005 ( www.alistapart.com/articles/zombiecopy).

Solution: Probably the poster child for corporate-speak abuse, this once great word now appears on an incalculable number of company websites. Unfortunately, while elegant, it has little meaning when orphaned, especially in a site’s navigation. The word is still valid when meaning an actual answer to a problem, but not when used as a replacement for more tangible words like products or services.

Utilize: The major problem with utilize is that it is simply overused. It may or may not be a direct replacement for use; in different situations, its meaning can connote something slightly different. For example, I can use this shovel to dig a hole (its intended purpose), or I can utilize this shovel to smash this lock open (an unintended use, no matter how practical). However, the problem lies in the fact that copywriters use utilize even when its monosyllabic cousin would be clearer and more to the point.

Enterprise: This word is just a flowery alternative to company. Who can seriously tell me they don’t think of Star Trek when they read it? A prime casualty of thesaurus abuse, try the more humane company, organization, or business instead.

Leverage: This is another alternative for use, but with major bonus pretension points. While a real word with real meaning, it hardly ever relates to the marketing material in which it finds itself. Your software might leverage your client’s IT investment, but it more likely takes advantage of that investment instead.

Best-of-breed: This one just has to stop. Probably one of the most pompous descriptors to come into common use, best-of-breed is a term best left to award ceremonies at dog shows. A marginally better best-in-class could be employed, or you could just stop writing empty modifiers and talk more about the real-world benefits of your company’s product.

Writing with clarity also requires the immediate cease-and-desist of trying to write with pomposity. People who try to write over the heads of their audience nearly always fall short; after all, what is the benefit of confusing your readers with sentences thicker than tar and as appetizing as sawdust? Removing these common sins from the copywriting toolbox can help further the cause of intelligibility:

Invented words: Making up words not only complicates language, but suggests one of two things: either the writer was not intelligent enough to think of a perfectly decent word, or the company regards its self-worth high enough to warrant its own secret language. There are many rather funny examples, but just keep in mind that verbing nouns only increases the complexification of wordspeak.

Acronyms: These poisonous little strings of letters are the darlings of technology pundits everywhere, from software makers to commercial equipment manufacturers to government agencies. Very few are valid. Just for fun, try to guess what these stand for: SERP, ECM, XSLT, OPML.

Superfluous modifiers: Modifiers are the subtle little attachments to nouns that make the subject sound just a bit better. Like a good pair of shoes, they provide flavor to the package—and, like a pair of hot-pink knee-high Nancy Sinatras, can quickly become distasteful. We discussed best-of-breed in the preceding list; world-class, unprecedented, and others also appear with uncomfortable frequency.

Provide the whole story

Don’t assume people know what you do, how you do it, where you are, or when you started. Providing all this information offers people the whole picture of your company. Leaving out a key piece of the puzzle just annoys visitors and puts them off going any further. For instance, a web page describing the services of the company should be rich with detail, whether marketing copy, testimonials, or illustrations. Failing to adequately inform readers about what the company does and its methodologies results in only one thing: less interest.

Short paragraphs

The print medium provides designers tremendous creative freedom. If they want 2-inch columns, text set at 8 points and the background a light gray, there’s not a darn thing the reader can do about it. This flexibility in design accommodates different content styles as well; our example of carefully designed columns would handily fit denser type and longer, multi-sentence paragraphs.

The Internet ignores all constants. Text size is dictated by the user, and long paragraphs of text can quickly become unwieldy on a wide monitor, causing reading speed and information retention to plummet. Because of this unpredictability, the best web content is written like newspaper copy: short paragraphs that focus on one thought and rarely exceed three sentences. This fast-paced style organizes thoughts into easily digestible chunks, and helps the eye travel from block to block through the copious whitespace.

So how long is a paragraph on the Web? A 50-word paragraph is reasonable; shorter is better. It has been demonstrated over and over again that readers scan web content quickly, rarely lingering to read and fully digest the information. Short paragraphs oblige this pattern.

Bullets

Like short paragraphs, bullets help readers lightly graze on content to help determine whether they’re in the right place. Here are some general guidelines:

1. Keep bullets short and punchy.
2. Group them together in logical clumps.

Don’t overuse them.

It’s best to mix bullet points with paragraphs to break up content and keep the eye moving. This also avoids feeling too much like PowerPoint. Also, be careful that your bullets— which are intended to abbreviate and highlight key messages—do not obfuscate your message. It is entirely too easy to truncate a complete thought so much that it becomes meaningless to your readers.

Reading level

Most television sitcoms are written at an eighth-grade reading level to appeal to the widest audience possible. News and editorial programs might be written for a more educated audience, but I would bet that if you sat a class of 13-year-olds in front of the TV, they would understand almost every word on CNN. Television is written by professionals who know how to speak to a broad demographic in a common language. It would be wise for companies to follow TV’s lead. It’s common to assume your audience is more educated than they really are, but even if that’s true, people don’t want to think too hard when reading, especially on the Web, where the term reading is used loosely.