Why can’t businesses talk proper? That question was posed at an event for City professionals last week. The panels included Rupert Soames, the CBI president and one of the UK’s most experienced bosses, Lucy Elphinstone, a former head of Francis Holland school in London, and me.
Any article about bad writing is a hostage to fortune so I’m sorry in advance for my own mistakes. This isn’t about pedantry, but clarity.
We’re all bombarded with corporate gobbledegook, a scourge of modern life. Companies either don’t know or don’t care that it annoys and alienates customers.
Businesses want to build relationships with customers and with their staff, but don’t seem to realise ugly and impenetrable language is a turn-off and a barrier.
It also destroys trust, creating an impression – often right – that firms use a blizzard of words to hide sharp practice. Companies deploy language as a weapon against customers, for instance in the small print insurers use to avoid paying claims. This is doubly horrible, because people only contact an insurer at a time of crisis and stress.
Corporate gobbledegook: Businesses want to build relationships with customers and with their staff, but don’t seem to realise ugly and impenetrable language is a turn-off and a barrier
The insurance companies should show empathy, reassure and help their policyholders. Instead, their communications are designed to catch people out. The high-handed manner is based on their suspicion all customers are likely either to be outright fraudsters, or at a minimum trying to inflate their claim.
Banks and investment companies are often as bad. Many people feel intimidated to deal with their lender, especially if in financial difficulty. The risks and rewards of investment products are often poorly explained.
There are some exceptions. Online bank Monzo is on a mission to speak in plain English and trains staff to do so in lessons called ‘Writing slightly betterly’.
It has put an excellent guide on its website with advice such as: use normal words not formal ones, don’t use jargon, concentrate on what matters to customers.
Monzo believes it pays off to speak to customers as if they were human beings.
Explaining investments in clear and simple terms expands the market for them. Plain English is profitable.
So why don’t more companies copy Monzo? The usual answer from firms is they must write obscurely due to legal issues of some mysterious nature. But there is no law saying firms must write gibberish or strew acronyms like confetti.
I suspect the real motive when companies write badly is they are trying to establish superiority and control.
Technical words signal membership of an elite club to which customers have not been invited. The irony is that companies are in fact acutely aware of the offence words can cause.
Lloyds Bank’s inclusive language guide, as the Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday, warns against using the word ‘widow’.
This is on the grounds it might upset widows, even though the bank owns the insurance company Scottish Widows.
The bank indulges this nonsense, while allowing vast amounts of corporate claptrap to descend on us unchecked.
Poor prose is an unacceptable transfer of effort from writer to reader. Instead of putting in the work to write clearly, companies force customers to waste their time trying to wade through verbiage.
English is the language of Dickens and Shakespeare. It is also the universal language of business. Yet firms seem intent on squandering one of our greatest national assets.
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