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[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?

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[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...