Business English: Jargon vs Informality

Everybody’s all up in arms about the decline of care of English in the workplace. I agree, but for mostly different reasons. What people are fussing about is the introduction of social-media-popularized informality and txtspeak (source, source).

Yeah, that sucks. But as you can tell, I’m sometimes part of the problem. And it’s not the worse problem I see every day.

The problem I see is exactly the opposite. People try so hard to be “businesslike,” without any attention paid to how you actually structure a sentence, that they murder English every day.

Txtspeak might be unprofessional, but I can usually tell what you’re getting at, anyway. Business jargon? There’s no telling, sometimes, what your actual point is. And heaven forbid you try to correct it.

“I know you’re trying to make it all grammatically correct and everything, but…” started one of my editing reprimands once upon a time.

Far too many people would rather sound important than be understood. They would rather be impressive than correct.

It makes me twitch.