Web writing gone wrong
You would think that after at least ten or 15 years of the web people would know that brief is good and justified text is difficult to read online. I don’t want to get sued, but I have to say it’s just as well this training company doesn’t teach web writing or plain English. And why are they called Sold Out Trainers – a name that suggests a faint tang of sweaty feet, without actually meaning old running shoes at all?
It’s a sort of poetry gone wrong. And there is so much wrong with the four justified paragraphs at the end of this webpage – including the danger icon next to the paragraph on ‘Impact’, the one that ends with the word ‘impactful’.
The writer has tried to get into your – the user’s – mind. These paragraphs are written from your point of view. So, when considering the issue of trust, it is you who think:
“We want to work with a training company in whom we can trust to maintain their standards for the lifetime of our relationship…”
Could it possibly be that whoever put this up on the web was too tight to pay for an editor, let alone a decent writer or anyone with experience of writing for the web? Or could it be that they are part of the conspiracy?
I merely speculate of course, but this long justified paragraph goes on and on, using all the usual words (“innovative”, “exceptional”, “engaged”) and phrases (“taking ownership of delivery”). And yet ironically, it ends with the suggestion that users should:
“look at us with a fresh pair of eyes”.
This is so typical of business English – this need to stick in an ‘in which’ ‘to whom’ etc just for the sake of it.
I think it started with people being irrationally frightened of ending their sentences with a preposition, but now people just stick them in anyway, where they’re not needed, because they think it sounds a little bit more formal. And they think sounding more formal means sounding professional.
I don’t think people who write like this even know what a preposition is, but if they did they would no doubt contort all their writing to be sure of never ending a sentence with one.
This mad craze is what HW Fowler described as a “cherished superstition” in his Modern English Usage:
“in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late”.
Fowler blames the 17th century poet and dramatist, John Dryden, who, Fowler says, went back and reworked all his prose so that his sentences never ended with prepositions.
In all fairness however, Dryden was a literary genius not a middle-management business executive. And he wasn’t writing for the web.
As Winston Churchill said:
“This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
And Churchill is not the only politician to have stood up in support of plain English – the US Senate has just passed a bill forcing credit card companies to use plain English.
A regular reader dangled this at the dangling modifier, where you too can share news and the bad writing you come across in your work.
