Recently in Egregious Corporate-speak Category

It was a busy day in the Proofreader's Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake. And not merely busy, but spiritually trying as well. Because, for some reason or other -- evil spirits? Sunspots? Global warming? -- there was a steady stream of extraordinarily ghastly material passing before my aching eyes today. It's usually not so steadily awful. Most of the time, it's adequate-to-good with only occasional clunkers to liven up the mix. Today, though... wow. It was all bad today. However, there's awful and then there's awful, and the following sentence stood out even against that vast, wine-dark sea of fetid effluvium:

[Acronym A], an enhancement to [Acronym B], allows [Company Y] to manage the performance of critical enterprise applications end-to-end globally and optimize the performance dynamically across any network according to user criticality and bandwidth allocation.

Got that? Yeah, neither did I, not until I'd read it three times. Which is not exactly the hallmark of what I'd call good writing. It burns the creative soul to have to read this stuff, let me tell you...

Incidentally, as long as we're chatting, here's a Jargon Alert for you: "value stack," as in "both competitors are moving up the value stack into IT services." That's one I'm going to be trying to work into daily usage for sure.

And finally, the amusing error of the day: I requested that the word "synchronization" be changed to "synchronize." Well, someone misunderstood my scribblings, so when I got the document in question back for final inspection, I saw that the word had become -- are you ready for this? -- "synchronizate." That's almost as good as the time in 9th grade geology class when my buddy Keith couldn't think of the verb form of the word "revolution" -- that would be "revolve," of course -- and came up with "revolute" instead.

Yeah... good times down there in the old Proofreaders Cave, good times...

Business writing is so painful sometimes...

Some see the emergence of UC&C as the catalyst for a sea change in long-established business organizational models, particularly as new methods of team productivity supplant conventional corporate hierarchies as potent mechanisms for wealth creation.

The first half of that sentence isn't too bad, but everything from the comma forward... oy. It makes my heart hurt.

Um... I really have nothing to say about this, but it was so magnificently daft that I simply had to share:

To create a install script to update the binary on the target computer, you need to create an install script.

Circular logic at its finest, eh? Pretty much everything I've proofread all bloody day has looked something like that...

Oh, boy, here we go again... another perfectly good noun transmogrified into an inelegant verb by the corporate buzz-speakers. From the document I'm proofing at work this afternoon:

"Can you evidence your compliance to... these standards?"

Evidence your compliance? Do you think they mean supply evidence of your compliance?

If you need me for the next few minutes, I'll be beating my head on a copy of Merriam-Webster's.

[Update: Huh. According to Merriam-Webster's, evidence was a verb, once upon a time. Circa 1610, to be precise, when it meant "to offer evidence of : PROVE, EVINCE syn see SHOW."

Somehow, I doubt that whoever wrote the whitepaper I found the term in knew that, though.]

From today's exciting chapter of Adventures in Proofreading, a question: do you think we can successfully guess the favorite movie of the copywriter who describes a particular product as "...one management console to bind all solutions?"

And do you suppose this console ever sends out messages that say, in a dark and creepy voice, "I seeeeee youuuuu...."?

It's been a while since I posted any examples of especially bad prose encountered during my day job as a mild-mannered proofreader at a major metropolitan corporation. I was beginning to think that I'd never again find anything dunderheaded enough to bother sharing with my Three Loyal Readers.

I was wrong. Check this out:

A period is defined as the amount of day’s/weeks it takes...

It's not Egregious Corporate Speak in the sense of being a conglomeration of marketing buzzwords and other jargon, but it definitely appears to have been deliberately designed to give me a headache. The thing I don't get is why more than one day requires the apostrophe while more than one week does not. Does someone think there are different pluralization rules for different time periods?

Oy.

It's been a while since I encountered any notably bad copy in the course of my day job as a proofreader. I was beginning think I'd jumped the gun by creating a whole blog category for material that seemed to be on the wane. Then this morning I encountered the following gem, which isn't technically "egregious corporate-speak," but certainly does have a problem:

This self-guided overview... focuses on the benefits of reducing re-key of data and order accuracy.

That sounds great, doesn't it? I can certainly see how reducing order accuracy would generate all kinds of benefits...

ADDENDUM: Here's another example from the same document:

The Query Operators section [of this document] is useful in providing guidance on getting better search results; particularly valuable when searching.

Yes, I can see how it would be...

Here's a good one culled from the day's proofreading work: in a document discussing the "personal journal" feature of a wireless handheld, a copywriter for my agency spelled "journal" as "jernal." Incidentally, the copywriters are all supposed to be college-educated, and they're probably making more money than I am. Oy.

It doesn't exactly qualify as "Egregious Corporate Speak" but it's pretty egregious on its own terms...

So, as long as I'm complaining about copy errors that makes me want to reach for a cocktail, it's probably a good time for another in our on-going series that I like to call Egregious Examples of IT Industry Corporate-Speak. This one illustrates my biggest personal pet peeve as a copy writer, proofreader, and editor, namely the repurposing of nouns into verbs. (Is "repurposing" yet another example? Hmm... could be... might have to look that up.)

This is turning into a regular feature here on Simple Tricks, isn't it? I'm thinking I may have to start a sub-category for it. Anyhow, here's today's egregious turn of phrase, fresh out the warm, steaming interior of some copy writer's PC:

Our consultants drive thought leadership in the security industry...

"Thought leadership?" What the heck is that? Sounds like it involves electrodes and clamps to hold your eyeballs open so you can't look away from the product infomercials. Either that or it's something Tom Cruise will be praising as the solution to everyone's problems the next time he's on Oprah...