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…
“user criticality ” jumped right out. Criticality?
Yeah, I don’t know what that is either… I surmise it refers to the importance of a particular user and thus how much he gets in the way of computing resources.
I don’t know about “user criticality,” “value stack,” and the rest, but I’m definitely going to use “fetid effluvium” today if I can!
Jason – as much as I enjoy reading your blog, I’m guessing it’s a good thing we don’t work together.
I understood the sentence perfectly well the first time I read it (and have likely written similar sentences recently). My only complaint would have been that they basically said the same thing twice (the “manage the performance…” and “optimize the performance…” clauses basically say the same thing).
“Criticality” is a measure of how critical something is. Very common term where I come from… 😉
Thanks, Robert – I am rather proud of myself for that particular phrase… 🙂
Brian, I actually understand this sentence well enough — when I do these entries, I tend to play up the horror, bafflement, etc., for (hopefully) comic effect. In my own defense, I think I have a reasonably good grasp on IT-related things (for a former English major) and I’m proud to say that my coworkers often come to me with tech-related questions because they know I get the basics.
That said, however, I don’t see how anyone could really consider something like this good writing, or even merely clear writing. But then I’m coming from a literary background and a personal philosophy that all writing, regardless of subject matter or intended audience, should be easily understandable by any reasonably educated person. I’ve disliked jargon and needlessly clique-ish writing my entire adult professional life, and I do whatever small things I can to make (sometimes deliberately) insular corners of the world more accessible for all the laypeople out there. (The great irony, of course, is that the necessity of actually making a living has planted me in a place where I’ve got no choice but to confront jargon on a daily basis… sigh.)