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posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 17 2017, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the speak-regular-words dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Most of us tailor our language to our audience. We choose different words when talking to our child than when talking to our spouse, our pastor or our boss. We may not even notice that we are doing it. It's often automatic and unintentional.

At work, knowingly or not, people choose words for specific purposes beyond just conveying an idea. They want to impress, show deference, take credit, look smart, intimidate, dominate or avoid blame. They want to cover up their own incompetence or avoid managerial scrutiny.

Unfortunately, they often employ communications strategies that backfire by distracting from the message and subtext they want to convey and instead placing focus on the language and the speaker. This can make them seem pompous or condescending, caricatures to be mocked rather than professionals to be admired.

Here are a few of the ways people undermine their own credibility.

You verb a noun or adjective by using it as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech. Instead of offering people incentives, you incent them. Instead of giving a gift, you gift them. You upskill yourself instead of learning something new. You workshop ideas, calendar meetings and architect systems.

[...] You jargon your communications by using terms of your trade when speaking to people who are unlikely to fully understand their meaning. Instead of using normal English, you use unknown words or phrases, transforming your ideas into gibberish in the minds of your audience. IT folks have a particularly bad reputation for jargoning our stakeholders to death. We tell them that we will form an agile team, use a mesh network or a NoSQL database, without any explanation.

[...] Acronyming is a lot like jargoning but uses abbreviations that your audience is unlikely to know. "Hi. I'm John from the PMO and you've been assigned as our project SME. We've already decided to use a SaaS model for our IoT product to maximize the ROI." As with jargon, acronyms appear distancing and disrespectful.

We all know what clichéing is: employing overused phases to convey common ideas. "I know we're going to be late, but every cloud has a silver lining." "We're going to avoid that technology like the plague." "I'd fit really well into your team because I'm a jack-of-all-trades, people person."

Clichés may convey the ideas you are trying to communicate, but they also create negative impressions of you. Cliché spouters appear to be inarticulate and imprecise. When someone uses a cliché to explain something to me, I assume that he is using vague generalities because he either doesn't understand or wants to avoid the specifics of the situation at hand. He seems incompetent or secretive.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @11:51AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @11:51AM (#495210)

    Relevant: Buzzword Bingo [wikipedia.org].

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday April 17 2017, @12:11PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 17 2017, @12:11PM (#495214) Journal

    If used on purpose, it can be an extremely effective tactic - see BOFH [theregister.co.uk] for brilliant examples (true, sometimes the most effective tactics can fail, better have other means - like heavy objects and certain windows - handy for when you need them).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @03:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @03:30PM (#495290)

      ...and certain windows - handy for when you need them.

      Windows 10?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Monday April 17 2017, @03:10PM

    by driverless (4770) on Monday April 17 2017, @03:10PM (#495280)

    With sentences like:

    IT folks have a particularly bad reputation for jargoning our stakeholders to death.

    it's clear that the person who wrote the original article is actually part of the problem. There's so much wrong packed into that one sentence that it would take about two paragraphs to describe it all.