I rediscovered today in Guy’s blog a great essay about writing by George Orwell (the original article is here).

I have to read (and write) almost daily a lot of English language documents: business cases, project initiations, reports, meeting minutes, etc.

Quote from George Orwell:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

All the current business documents are written using this “modern English” language or even worst.

Who is not tired of: “Time to Market”, “on the same page”, “at the end of the day”, “in a nutshell”, “total cost of ownership”, “business value” and so on.

Pages and pages of words voided of almost all the meaning. And we write like we speak. And we wander why staff is playing bullshit bingo in the meetings.

Even a business case must be written in good English. So, this is a letter to all writers:

Dear All,
Please read the great essay of George Orwell. Before starting to write anything, please read it again. After you finish writing read it again and correct you work.

Thank you,
Your Reader.

PS: And I don’t even mentioned vendor marketing materials. Another fine example of “business language”!