Colouring In Communications
04/2011




A popular website features a game called Bullshit Bingo. The instructions are as follows: “Before each meeting or conference call, visit Bullshit Bingo and print one copy of this game card for each player…. Check off each block when you hear these words during the meeting or conference call. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout “Bullshit!!””. Some of the words include “Level Playing Field”, “Impactful” “Customer-Oriented”, “Leverage”, “Road map”, “Facilitate”, “Downsize”… no doubt we could be here all day, adding our own nominations to the list. Beyond its humorous intent, this website reminds us of the popular image of corporate communications: meaningless business-speak, empty phrases and convoluted concepts. At best, this kind of writing is evidence of woolly thinking, of concepts not quite fully grasped by the communicator. At worst, it represents an act of tacit deception: trying to create another, inaccurate version of events by pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes. This issue of Communication Director is designed to put a stop to all that! Our focus is on language and writing in corporate communication: in other words, the tools of the corporate communicator’s trade. As one of the interviewees in our opening Storyteller article puts it, “As professional communicators, we are there to write what our managers would write, if they only knew how. We’re the ones who know how to say it so the reader will get it.” Two of our authors refer to the famous ‘Five Ws’ of writing: the what, where, when, who and why. This suggests that good writing – as they define it, at least – is a measurable objective. It also describes a process of eliminating waste, like chiselling away at an ungainly block of raw material until the essentials are revealed. We hope that this issue will be a step towards reaffirming those essentials.

Marc-Oliver Voigt
Publisher
marc-oliver.voigt@communication-director.eu