This article, which includes comments from Ken Scudder on clear communication, appeared in the Triangle Business Journal on Friday, October 20, 2006.

CHAPEL HILL - Media exposure backfires on certain businesspeople. On TV and radio, they let fly buzzwords, only to see their attempts at seeming articulate fizzle.

In press releases, they string together phrases like Christmas lights, hoping to dazzle but ending up dazing the recipients.

The remedy is clear, concise, concrete language. Nothing muddled, nothing fancy, nothing long-winded. Buzzwords and jargon should be silenced first.

"They're similar to obscenity - you know it when you hear it," says Ken Scudder, vice president and co-founder of New York-based Virgil Scudder & Associates. Among its services, VS&A offers media training to clients including Time-Warner, Pepsi-Cola and Nasdaq.

According to Scudder, others view buzzword users as "trend-followers or empty suits."

John Walston, a former deputy managing editor for USA Today and a former editorial director for United Press International, says he has received press releases too buzz-laden to salvage. "You couldn't figure out how to write it in plain old English," Walston says.

Fed up, he founded BuzzWhack.com, a Web site "dedicated to de-mystifying buzzwords."

Calling himself BuzzWhacker-in-Chief, Walston put out a call for buzzwords, receiving enough submissions to compile "The Buzzword Dictionary: 1,000 Phrases Translated From Pompous To English." The book was published in September.

According to Walston, technology marketing contributed its fair share of entries: "robust" and "scalable" and "strategic." Coffee is robust.

"And everything is 'leading'," he complains.

Many buzzwords start off as respectable nouns only to end up as verbs. Incentive melts to incent or incentize. Gumming on suffixes such as -ize is a common way to invent buzz. Using prefixes accomplishes the same, even if it creates nonsense.

"How can you pre-allocate something?" Walston asks.

At VS&A, Scudder tells clients to stick with language comprehensible to a relatively intelligent 12-year-old. Because 12-year-olds have an advantage where technology is concerned, when commenting on that industry, Scudder says to gear messages to a relatively intelligent 60-year-old instead.

Walston recommends reading a child's fifth-grade book or a basic newspaper article to find the appropriate level. People often forget that, like everyone else, really smart people understand clear, plain language. "Smart people appreciate clarity the most," says Walston.

Richard Lederer, a member of the high IQ society Mensa, agrees. Lederer holds a Ph.D. in English and linguistics and has published more than 30 books on language and humor.

"Speak plain English," he says, "simple, not simplistic. Use fresh, honest language."
Lederer objects to vague phrases and euphemisms, which sometimes aim to deceive. Certain creations are ridiculous, Lederer finds, citing automotive internist for mechanic.

Inventions such as de-selected, a euphemism for being fired, are cruel. More ominous still is human capital, a phrase that replaces employee. "Sometimes this language covers up horrible things," Lederer says.

Acronyms such as PIN and initialisms such as CEO enrich the language. Pulverizing mouthfuls of words, they make life easier. Why chew through Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees-IRA when SIMPLE-IRA is easier to swallow?

But too many acronyms and initialisms can have the opposite effect, according to Dulcie Straughan, associate dean for undergraduate studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Straughan spent six years in public information work, listening to government officials speak whole paragraphs dominated by acronyms and initialisms. "They could go on for three or four sentences and, in that time, recite almost the entire alphabet," Straughan says.

Only the most familiar acronyms should be used with general audiences, Straughan says. NASA won't stump anyone, but CAPER (Conceptual Astronomy and Physics Education Research of the University of Arizona) might.

Buzz, jargon, abstract words - taken together they're called gobbledygook, pretentious, long-winded language that defies comprehension.

To illustrate, one might attempt to augment this sentence by leveraging intellectual assets to afford readers an opportunity to explore by means of a highly effective model how undesirable is excess verbiage, vague phraseology and sesquipedalism.

"It creates a white noise that blocks out communication," Lederer says.

One might as well not bother. As Straughan points out, such talk doesn't lend itself to soundbites.

If the goal is communication, or perhaps causing someone to act, anything other than clear language defeats the purpose.