Business Speak (BS) originally served the innocent purpose of delivering unfavorable messages in a sensitive and gentle manner. It’s always nice to be mindful of recipients’ feelings when we’re forced to criticize them or bring them bad news. Recent trends and general consensus, however, indicate that BS is now being used for everyday communication between colleagues, and has infiltrated the web to such a degree that users can’t even understand what a company does by reading its homepage. How did this happen, and why should we care?
BS, as we know it today, is really just doublespeak, which is defined as “evasive, ambiguous language that is intended to deceive or confuse.” Ah ha! Enlightenment! So people use BS to produce the illusion of knowledge about a given subject. This explains how BS managed to invade our everyday lives so thoroughly – it self-propagates. Recipients become confused by the lack of actual meaning and attempt to cover up this fact by using more BS. Eventually, everyone’s doing it!
If everyone’s guilty, we shouldn’t really worry about it, right? Wrong! Due to its deceptive nature, BS results in a number of harmful side effects:
- Questions that can’t be answered because they don’t actually mean anything.
- Teams that can’t work together because no one really knows what anyone else is talking about.
- Popular words or phrases that don’t mean anything anymore, but people use them for everything.
- Homepages that frustrate users, most of whom don’t have the patience to read, much less translate, all of that BS. This drives customers toward your competitors and damages your brand.
- Tasks that can’t be completed because the recipient can’t understand what they’re being asked to do. If you don’t know what you want done, don’t use BS to cover it up, just say what you know, then give the recipient permission to make assumptions and decisions as necessary to complete the task.
- Evasive answers to questions – this breeds suspicion and distrust in the recipient, which is not something you want with a client.
- Agreements that wouldn’t have been made if one or more parties involved truly understood what they were agreeing to.
- Blatant inaccuracies in terminology that hinder progress in the industry overall, because professionals are unable to communicate with the necessary level of specificity to describe new ideas.
So while jargon is fine amongst those who understand it and BS has its purpose in softening the blow of negative comments, the rampant misuse of BS in the web design industry and at large is not doing anyone any favors.
Q.E.D.
2 Comments
great topic.
in my eyes we have not only BS but also politics. and possibly legal language. so i’d rather call it … what shall we call it? spongy talk? too informal. soft-talk? discriminating kindness.
yes it is wrong to use because- in my life:
. companies’ products can’t be compared
. “customers”‘ needs can’t be fulfilled because everybody uses buzz words
. people can’t be found/hired because of constantly changing job titles
etc
While I believe that business speak (BS) is very important in professional communications, I think it has several glaring problems. It is far too easy to abuse this manner of communicating in order to cover one’s lack of knowledge or use it in a desire to sound intellectual. Business Speak (or Political Speak)is also very difficult for new people to understand, since this “language” is not taught in college. For people are are accustomed to this type of speak, any misuse of words can create alot of confusion. So I think there needs to be more emphasis in schools and in business to take BS more seriously and use this form of communication more carefully.