(no subject)

[dwenius]

Then I started writing business requirements docs, and some technical presentations, and while I enjoyed it, the fun was in knowing the tech stuff cold, not necessarily in the writing, most of which involved handling ugly MS Word templates involving bulleted lists within tables. But that part with the power of my enormous brain? That's cherry, keep that part for the archives. The higher I rise in the organization, the more I find that the purely technical writing I used to enjoy becomes warpedoed into strategy (read: more abstract and highly mendacious). Rarely, I realize that all of the actual, you know, content I take pride in is gone, and I'm writing pure sales collateral.

Now, most business writing is complete bullshit; it's purposely vague, passive, and intransitive. It annoys the living fuck out of me. Yet, there can be a craft to it, even writing sales language. I am merciless when editing my cow orkers; I call out every bit of grammar nazi pedantry I can muster. I sit with our marketing folks and suggest dozens of turns of phrase...anything to replace the weak positioning statements we have now. Before sending large or complex docs to a third party, I search for every instance of the words very, always, are/is/be, can/will/should, to, for, provides/enables/ensures, permits/allows/demands/requires, all pronouns, all adverbs, and all apostrophes. Hey, for my style, and given the material at hand, those are the harbingers of weak writing, so I check 'em all. I'll spend hours streamlining 5 slides into 3, so I have more room for questions or my own digressions. I've been up late nights most of this calendar year revising a bunch of material so it will help us close some large deals; I do, in fact, lose sleep over it.

Ok, now imagine you are the Federal Reserve Bank.

When you talk to Congress, nobody cares about whether the prime rate is going to move, that's old news, leaked days before. People know, and they've already reacted in advance. But then there is the little matter of the clarifying remarks, a brief (2 paragraphs?) discussion of what might be. The Fed knows its words are watched with preternatural interest. Fed policy wonks have been carefully honing a truncated vocabulary for years; careful Fed watchers must have their own lexicon with translations in a careful hierarchy, where the difference between "foreseeable future" and "considerable period" is a precise measurement. Or maybe not:

"This has been a fundamental problem with the Fed's whole approach to policy making," said Ethan Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers. "By changing their language so frequently, they make it impossible to figure out what they're doing."

Translation: "I lost my seekrit decoder ring, and I no longer have an unfair advantage in the stock market over Lil' Joe Average Investor, Wahhh!"

My point here is that I find the matters of scale here fascinating. I get into a pondering mood when I realize that, if I give a particularly good sales bit or prove to some tech manager that my company knows more than his staff, it can be worth a few million dollars. If the Fed changes one word too many, OTOH, say going from "improving modestly" to "improving steadily", it can tank the whole U.S. economy. If you don't believe that statement, then you may have forgotten the whole "irrational exuberance" language bomb. I wonder if Alan Greenspan ever loses sleep over this?

Comments

I feel your pain.

[kmhoofnagle.livejournal.com]

While I grind my teeth over language clarity and quality, I have to conclude based on the bids we've won in the past and the language submitted with them that clients don't actually read our proposals. They weigh them and then go talk to our client references. We win or lose based on our references. (Which are excellent.) I really think we do.

Of course we're software and you're hardware and engineering support, so the people buying your stuff presumably have to be able to understand what you say in technical terms. People who buy our stuff just have to believe we understand their business problem and have really delivered solutions to it before.

*sigh*
k.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

We live and die by our references also, and yes, they are superb.

Another difference here is that, when people go to buy software, they usually know what they want. Oh, I don't mean they have a neat little requirements document that spells out what you are supposed to build; nobody has that, ever :) But as you say, they have some defined business problem, and you can usually find someone who can articulate it in a way that tells you what to go code.

Our clients on the services side are occasionally completely clueless in this regard. They think they want performance tuning; they really need more rigorous QA. They think they have hardware capacity problems, but it's really bad application configs, poor J2EE caching, and a stray outer join or two. They think they need the freedom to slap new fixes in production anytime; what they really need is better QA and a reversible change management process. And so on.

For us, a good proposal or intro sales deck is a means to focus the question. We need to smack down all the immediate Not-Invented-Here resistance, and draw out the buyer in a way that gives us an "operating pain" story we can hang our services on. Once we have the hook, it's easy. Getting people to understand that it's fishing season, that's hard.

[mrbalihai.livejournal.com]

Our department editors actually hosted brownbags on the evils of passive voice and how to ferret it out of our technical manuals. Consequently, I experience a short, sharp, Pavlovian reaction every time I use a form of "to be" in my docs. Of course, our managerial masters, in their infinite wisdom, decided that editors were superfluous fluff, axed them all in the last layoff, and told us to use MS Office grammar and spellcheck instead.

Oh pointy-haired bosses
Oh pointy pointy
Anoint our heads
Anointy 'nointy

-Apologies to Steve Martin

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Of course, our managerial masters, in their infinite wisdom, decided that editors were superfluous fluff, axed them all in the last layoff

I *really* should stop reading doonesbury. in the face of statements like that, Trudeau's stuff just isn't funny anymore. :)

(of course, I think I said about 15 years ago when the "home mutual fund shopping channel" bit was written up as a satire in the 'Post, and nobody got the joke...)

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

If it is the modern variant of the program I think begat it, MS Office grammar thinks I am pretentious. It (it's grandfather, pre-MS-acquisition) was one of the first software programs to insult me, and curiously enough, it did so in a manner consistent with actual public sentiment in this regard. Uncanny...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ha, lose sleep? He's probably gneegneegneeing all the way home.

I do hate that the economy is affected so easily by stupid assclowns who try to interpret the words of Greenspan as if they were the Word of God. That sort of attitude also seems pervasive among conservative politicos, who try to explicate the Constitution as if it were the New Testament.

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I don't really have anything to add, except "Hey! Good entry!"

I enjoyed reading that.