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Jargon
Posted by: Catie Holdridge
09 / 04 / 09
We should all be eating more pollack, for cod’s sake. So say the environmentalists trying to save the perennial partner to chips from an early, non-watery grave: cod stocks in the North Sea are a mere fifth of what they were forty years ago. Sainsbury’s have given the humble pollack a makeover to boost its […]
Posted by: Rob Ashton
18 / 03 / 09
Council leaders have banned some 200 examples of the worst management jargon. But there are signs they’ve fallen into the lazy-writing trap themselves. A press release from the Local Government Association published today says that words such as ‘slippage’ (meaning delay), ‘benchmark’ (measure) and ‘procure’ (buy) are all out. So are management clichés like ‘thinking […]
13 / 02 / 09
Microsoft has announced it’s to open its own shops, in a clear bid to grab a slice of the Apple retail action. Apple trades on its image as the quintessence of cool: all innovative design and sleek lines. Microsoft may face an uphill battle in this respect, at least if its press release announcing the […]
Posted by: em-admin
15 / 01 / 09
Look out for the latest innocent-sounding financial buzz-phrase that hides some very big news indeed. This one sounds more benign than ‘sub-prime loans’. Yet its effects could be just as far reaching, if not more so. That phrase is ‘quantitative easing’. It may sound like the lesson you forgot in physics class, as Gerard Baker […]
15 / 10 / 08
Corporate jargon and management buzzwords are persistent pests. We train around two thousand people a year in business-writing skills. But we’ve yet to meet anyone who likes phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘blue-sky thinking’. ‘Raising the bar’ and ‘low hanging fruit’ sound more like some kind of tropical limbo challenge than anything to do with […]
12 / 11 / 06
New research reveals that an inability or reluctance to use plain English – or to keep it short and simple (KISS) – is still the single greatest barrier to good business writing. The findings by Emphasis, who have been training business people how to write for over eight years, show that a staggering 99 per […]
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