I get annoyed by thoughtless and uncreative use of certain overused terms/statements in corporate settings. Below are some that are so annoying, they distract me from the conversation. What are some that annoy you?
- Peel back the layers of an onion
- Incentivize
- Let’s table that so we can circle back to it later
- We’ll out that on the backburner
- Let’s not reinvent the wheel
- They just started a new project, so their plate’s full and might not have the bandwidth for an additional something else.
- Grab the low-hanging fruit
- That’s a game changer
- The ball’s in their court. If you don’t hear from them soon, send them an email to touch base.
- I sent it up the food chain, so it’s out of my hands.
- Let’s give it 110%
- There are lots of moving parts
- We need to have an aha moment
- At the end of the day, what matters are the key takeaways
- Let’s engage in the best practices
- They’re working on it as we speak
- It’s a controversial approach, so we might get some flak for that.
- So-and-so is not a people person
You may like the simple language stuff that is happening. There is a major effort to remove jargon, legalese and corporate nonsense from all customer facing documents.
It’s becoming an accessibility standard in my country. All government documents are expected to utilize this in the comming years.
The Hemingway Editor is becoming my friend in this fight. And Microsoft is starting to implement simple language suggestions in its products.
Hopfully it will soon hit RTE tools so that my long winded comments will also be simple.
Woah, I’m going to use that Hemingway Editor a lot. I can write wayyy too much sometimes. Thanks for sharing
I use it for technical manuals. I find it nails me a lot for passive writing. that part is painful to correct, but it makes a big difference.
At work my rules is to remove 50% of my words before anyone can see it. The later it gets, the worse my verbosity gets in text. This Hemingway editor does look interesting. I use simplewriter a lot, especially when I’m doing technical writing for mixed language audiences.