Thursday, May 19, 2016

A new Caped Crusader to the rescue

There's so much bad writing in the business world. It pains me that anyone has to read it. It pains me even more when I have to read it.

Look, I am about the most highly incentivized reader this dreck will ever have. Other than the person (or, more likely, the committee) who wrote it, no one—and I mean no one—cares more about what this stuff says than I do. That's because I'm being paid to read it. My job, more often than not, is to chip away at the jargon, untangle the convoluted syntax, and find at least one sensible nugget of information to expand on for my clients.

Really, though, it shouldn't be this hard.

I recently extended my business to include Coaching & Development, with the tagline—well, take a look at the logo:

"Making the world more interesting, one sentence at a time."

That statement makes me feel like a Caped Crusader, standing legs akimbo atop a tall building—a library, perhaps—and scanning the horizon for poorly trained writers about to commit verbicide on a white paper that will make its readers see red. If it has readers at all.

These writers need me. I can teach them how to create sensible sentences. How to jettison jargon. How to not overuse alliteration because, really, after the first instance it just starts to sound gimmicky. Right?

I'm on a mission to make the world more interesting, one sentence at a time. Join me—and tell your friends!

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