by Sue Horner | Sep 7, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The plaintive opening drew me in immediately: “Why are many financial news releases and publicly filed documents written so poorly?” In A Plea for Plain English in Financial Documents, Steve Lipin and Adam Rosman make the case for good writing in financial...
by Sue Horner | Aug 31, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Last month, my bank sent me a snail mail letter alerting me to “Important changes” coming to my business account. The brochure got closer to the point: “Effective September 1, 2016, we’re simplifying our Business Banking Plans and making...
by Sue Horner | Aug 10, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The Olympics can’t keep up with the corporate world when it comes to jargon, but they sure have a vocabulary all their own. With the 2016 Summer Olympics in full swing in Rio, let’s take a look. The most noteworthy/cringeworthy is how achieving a medal has...
by Sue Horner | May 26, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The well of BS is endless, as a new Twitter connection observed about business jargon this week. During the exchange, the word stakeholder came up. Fans find it a useful word describing people with an interest in something, an expansion of the original shareholders...
by Sue Horner | May 19, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Time to get cranky, again, about jargon and annoying words. Who’s with me? First up are overused words that are quickly becoming jargon: Hacks. I get it, it’s a handy short word, which is useful in headlines. In most cases, it’s thin disguise for...
by Sue Horner | Jan 25, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Inc.com’s contributing editor, Geoffrey James, doesn’t sugarcoat it. In a piece called How Corporate-Speak Rots Your Brain and How To Stop It, he says jargon “makes you and everyone around you progressively less intelligent.” What’s more, rather than making you sound...
by Sue Horner | Sep 2, 2015 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Not to be like the old guy on the porch yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!” or anything, but here’s another phrase that’s starting to annoy me: “Like a boss.” (I last vented about “hacking your life.”) The Telegraph...
by Sue Horner | Jan 23, 2015 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Don’t tell me you’ve found a way to “hack” your life, or your morning, or your productivity. The tiresome term appears to spring from the standard dictionary definition of “to alter (a computer program).” It gets a nod as slang for...
by Sue Horner | Aug 21, 2014 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Newsletter articles and any other writing — speaking too! — can be improved if you cut out “hollow and meaningless” business language. This gobbledygook is also known as jargon monoxide, a wonderful term I discovered this week in a tweet by Stanford...
by Sue Horner | Nov 22, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The author of one of my textbooks must be a friend of the magniloquent (see below) Conrad Black, or maybe a contributor to the harder levels of FreeRice.com. I say that because the text is sprinkled with so many obscure, unusual, “look how smart I am” kinds of words....
