Does writing sometimes seem like there’s a cage around your head that stops you getting your ideas out? Are the ‘rules’ of writing a prison for your words? This is the Word Cage.

You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.

George Orwell, 1984

Let’s dare to get past our fears and look beyond the bars to see what’s really important — the readers on the other side.

What makes a great escape?

The first step to freedom is recognising the prison that traps your words. And, for most people trying to write for their business, that prison is fear. Fear of not sounding professional enough. This fear has led to an entirely unnatural and ineffective writing style we’ll call Businesspeak.

Businesspeak

This is also unlovingly referred to as ‘corporate waffle’. You know the kind of thing:

“At blah.com we have a passion for delivering innovative integrated nutrition delivery systems”

“Oh, you sell knives and forks then?”

George Orwell looked at this phenomenon by translating Ecclesiastes 9:11 from the King James version into Businesspeak. Now, considering it was first published in 1611, allow me to put this into modern English without butchering it too much:

The race doesn’t always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, bread to the wise, riches to clever people nor good things to skilled people; time and chance happen to all of them.

Becomes:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Which one is more effective? Which one gets its message across? Which is easier to read, more memorable and more engaging? Which one would you prefer to read?

Thought police

Meet the wardens who hold the keys to the Word Cage. They are the nameless/ faceless drones who perpetuate the myth that writing for business means using Businesspeak.

They see the clear expression of ideas, individuality and emotion in English not as the language’s most powerful asset, but as something to be eradicated.

Follow their example and you will fail to reach potential customers and won’t stand-out from your competitors.

Businesspeak fails you

Businesspeak fails on all counts. Far from sounding professional, you will only sound cold, distant and uncaring; you will talk at people not to them. That’s if the reader can even understand what you’re saying.

The professional thing to do is speak clearly in you own voice. Communicate effectively and remember that it’s not a business that reads what you write — it’s a person. A person with a limited attention span, with hopes, fears and wants (including, but not only, business wants).

Dare to break the ‘rules’

The Businesspeak myth has spawned many ‘rules’ that are at best nothing more than bars between you and your audience and at worse simply wrong and will hinder you communicating effectively.

Orwell, in his Politics and the English Language, wrote these 6 rules:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

They are great copywriting guidelines to combat Businesspeak, but to blindly follow and take them to extremes means stripping the power of the English language from your words. Remember, this was about trying to get politicians to speak clearly and even then Orwell puts the 6th clause in.

Blindly following these rules to the letter means the same tired old advice goes round and round the internet, usually in bulleted lists found under headings like “The Top 10 Ways to Write Better” and “Top 10 copywriting Tips“.

You’re writing for people and we are emotional creatures; our decisions are shaped by far more than logic — we form opinions and have gut feelings.