commbasics

 I love words. Always have. And this week, after reading several articles that use words badly I’ve come to understand why.  Words have clearly discernible meaning when used correctly, while finding meaning in life is often very difficult even in the best of circumstances. When used incorrectly, words lose meaning and that makes me feel a little lost and frustrated.  This line of thought began earlier this week when the redoubtable Brian Solis wrote an article on VentureBeat that was headlined “14 Startups That Will Change Our Everyday Life.”   Brian is high on my list of trustworthy people so whenever he posts something or I find he has written something, I generally read it. Don’t need a lot of hyperbole to encourage me. And Brian doesn’t engage much with hyperbole anyway, which is why the headline bothered me at first, but I read it. The article was about 14 companies with interesting products and services for specific market niches, but there was noth...

Words are not important in and of themselves. The ideas and concepts they convey are important. Several years ago I had a very difficult client who had a hard time understanding that.  We would put together a press release that described the benefits of a technology breakthrough in plain terms. The goal was to establish why this breakthrough was important. The CEO read it over once and said, “It needs more adjectives.” Three hours later we had sprinkled in enough adjectives to meet the CEOs requirements and the release was virtually unreadable.  This is a basic problem with all marketing material: An attachment to unsubstantiated superlatives bury the real content. A couple of decades before that, as a technical editor for Lockheed, I ran across the following phrase. “The RB impacts on the geoid, rather than the ellipsoid sphere.” I had a vague understanding of what that all meant, but I also knew that impact was a noun, not a verb. So I went to the engineer who authored t...