Many companies have scaled back the layers of
nonsensical verbiage, put their thesauruses back on the shelf, and started writing in plain
language again, like their forefathers in advertising taught them. The more your company
exercises this, the more effective and far-reaching its marketing material will be in the
market.
Have mercy on the thesaurus
The torrent of bad writing has left a graveyard of once-valid, now-clich?© words in its wake.
In the California Gold Rush of 1848 and 1849, thousands of people tore through rock and
stream to find any speck of gold their prospecting neighbor up the stream left behind. In
the late 1990s, the American English Thesaurus became a similar victim of pillaging.
Suddenly, plain English wasn??™t good enough. Use was replaced by utilize, company was
made obsolete by enterprise and the use of acronyms??”the ultimate achievement in
euphemistic writing??”was suddenly so fashionable you could invent them on the fly and
people would almost applaud. This swath of abuse sent dozens of useful but relatively
uncommon words crashing down into a pit of clich?©dom. Couple this with the invention of
new words (seriosity) and the trend of ridiculous modifiers (world-class), and we suddenly
have a template for how not to write.
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