How to Avoid Gobbledygook in Your Writing
January 30, 2010 by Rita Marshall
Confusing language has always been a pet peeve of mine. When I write, I picture people drinking in the information as if they were having a cool glass of water — the info is enjoyable, goes down easy and satisfies their needs.
Gobbledygook is the sludge in that glass of water, but unless you’re very disciplined in your materials, it can happen.
What kind of gobbledygook have you read, or even worse, inflicted on others?
- Buzzwords? (”leverage”, “value-added”)
- Cliches? (”110 percent”, “high performance”)
- The “professional” clunky phrases that businesses can’t seem to give up? (”pleased to”, “in terms of”)
Dow Jones and marketing strategist David Meerman Scott compiled a list of the Top 25 Gobbledygook words and phrases used in North American press releases in 2008. (Are they optimizing the value-added metrics to leverage their synergy before they are pleased to announce the 2009 list?)
Scott has come up with the Gobbledygook Grader, which lets you cut and paste your copy for the Grader to analyze. The results will give you a score out of 100, along with a list of the gobbledygook the Grader found in your materials. It won’t re-write the material, but it’s a good start to pouring your customers a new glass of water.
Did You Use Any of the Words of 2009?
January 9, 2010 by Rita Marshall
If you used Twitter or Facebook at all last year, you’re probably familiar with the newest additions to the Oxford Dictionary.
“Unfriend” was the word of the year, while “Tweetup” was a runner-up.
They weren’t all techie terms, though. My non-social media favourites include:
- zombie bank: a bank that only continues to operate because of a bailout
- phantonym: a noun that looks like it means one thing, but actually means another. As in, “fulsome” sounds like it should mean “really full”, when it actually means “excessive to the point of insincerity”.
The threat of phantonyms to the English language is of small concern, however, when PC World makes this observation about two other 2009 additions to the language:
The disappearance of free Internet access should give rise to some colourful new additions to the Oxford Dictionary in 2010.