breakfast
Robert KingettWho the fuck taught people how to pen business emails? Holy Christ on a cracker! Absolutely nothing creams my corn more than having to actively translate what these professional suits are typing to me. I just received an email that was 5 paragraphs that essentially boiled down to, hey, I really liked your report you sent last Monday. Can we schedule a Zoom call tomorrow? Yes or no? I am so tired of professional communications. I am frankly exhausted with having to translate professional sludge. Why in the healthiest of hell is it OK, even desirable, that our society likes this kind of mind nummingcommunication? Everybody calls it professional but I just call it a gigantic fucking headache. And who the hell came up with professionalism anyhow? I’m really starting to hate the concept of professionalism and professional writing styles. No wonder everyone has meetings. No one can write. No one can string together a competent business sentence without 90,000 corporate qualifiers. You can have perfect grammar and perfect spelling and in fact be the worst writer. Can we change what it means to write professionally? Because this is a level of hell that I never noticed prior to getting away from corporate offices. #Writing #Business
Sin Vega@WeirdWriter this is exactly the kind of shit that has me so unsurprised that so many people embrace the hollow garbage the regurgitation bots spew out. They've already been talking like that for years! They think that's what communicating is!
@sinvega Even in my younger liberal days, I never communicated like this. I guess my writing skill just kind of automatically shielded me from this kind of communication drudgery. Even when I worked as a PR intern, I never communicated like this. Ever
@WeirdWriter Oh I believe you, and me neither. But a lot of people in some places do and just... don't see how absurd and awful it is.
small consolation was when I was the only person at one place who didn't, and rapidly became the most treasured admin person for like 13 departments, because I answered questions and explained things honestly.
i mean, sure, I may send absurdly long emails even today, but at least they SAY a lot instead of just piling up meat in the rough shape of a person
@sinvega But That right there! You hit the nail on the head! I don’t mind long emails. I actually love it when someone sends me a lengthy novel comprised of information, thoughts and feelings, action plans, and more. I can’t describe what corporate types right like other than slob. It’s just qualifier words with no connection to the prior word. It’s aggressively noticeable the more you talk to folks like you and I
@WeirdWriter Several years back, I drank from the cursed chalice of working with other writers. Every email I've sent since has included swearing, jokes, naked candour, specific well wishes, legally actionable threats against various ministers, etc
It's made me basically unemployable. I'm not going back
FediThing 
There's a good essay by George Orwell called "Politics and the English language" making the case against over-elaborate language.
There's a phrase on the Wikipedia page about the essay which sums it up as "Writers find it easier to gum together long strings of words than to pick words specifically for their meaning."
This is eerily prescient of LLMs in predicting people's motivations and willingness to abandon thought.
The wikipedia page for the essay is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language
Seiðr@sinvega @WeirdWriter Opinion: corpo-speak is code-switching for an in-group of capitalist drones (a mix of brainwashed morons, psychopathic arseholes, and scammers).
JohanSubject: Clarification Regarding a Minor Observation on Email Communication Practices
Dear Robert,
I hope this message finds you well and that your week is progressing smoothly.
I wanted to briefly follow up regarding a small observation I encountered earlier today while reviewing a recent email exchange. After carefully reading through a thoughtfully composed message spanning several well-structured paragraphs, I was ultimately able to determine that the pri.. ran out of space
@jsjolen I choked on my cookie after hearing that. I hope there’s a part two! Absolutely hilarious
@WeirdWriter Haha, thanks. I did have a "part 2" but I just erased it when Mastodon complained about the length, sorry!
kit@WeirdWriter I hear you. I’m pretty sure that the main point of ”professional” is to ensure no blames attaches. I’m not entirely certain to whom.
@hypostase Yeah. You have a point. It’s just, I have to actively translate just floods and floods of sludge into something actionable and tangible and I’m just like, how did this get so entrenched into corporate culture? It’s overly ridiculous
@WeirdWriter It is, and it gets worse every year. One hopes that in smaller firms working closer to the edge there is a little more clarity.
diana 🏳️⚧️🦋🌱Does it get worse? Yes. I see my current org writing their emails in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Bad formatting and all. I wish I was joking.
They don't understand why I'm leaving this month for a new employer that requires everyone to have at least accredited engineering degrees and demonstrable experience.
Violet MadderProfessionalism = elitism. Lots of words makes things sound more complicated which equates to smartness and fanciness and gravitas. Displaying the hoops they're enthusiastic to jump through, to impress and conform. Ritualized garbage.
John Socks"Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"
Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle
Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study into “corporate BS” reveals.
rojun@John @WeirdWriter
> Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale
Had to do a double take to verify this wasn't onion.
Crystal@WeirdWriter
Sometimes a word can make me feel my age, and today's trigger is the descriptive word: professional. Back in my younger days, officious writing or wording was a clear indicator of a non-professional manner. Professionals were identified through clearly worded precis writing. You probably know as well as I do that passing a U.S. federal law did not visibly improve government communications!
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946
Sometimes a word can make me feel my age, and today's trigger is the descriptive word: professional. Back in my younger days, officious writing or wording was a clear indicator of a non-professional manner. Professionals were identified through clearly worded precis writing. You probably know as well as I do that passing a U.S. federal law did not visibly improve government communications!
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946
clewIf I may join the grump —
even older than any of us, “professional “ meant that the job was too subtle for non-practitioners to judge but too important to not be overseen. So professionals had to mutually uphold the standards and morals of each calling. They swore (professed) their duty.
This was a really powerful and admirable thing!
though it has also been suborned over and over. I can think of more books on how professionalism got turned into a power grab than the reverse.
The original problem, too necessary too subtle, still holds.
Lykso@WeirdWriter This is why business-brained people seem to like LLMs so much, IMO. "More words = better" for them. Much of what the suits do is merely performative; a gloss on a fundamentally unjust and corrupt system built to protect the interests of useless nepo-babies and other business owners. They write lengthy, empty emails because it produces the appearance of value and busy-ness for those who aren't so unfortunate as to have to *do* anything in response, such as actually *read* them.
@WeirdWriter The only "business owners" I've ever known to be worth a damn have been the owner-operator, small business types who started out doing the work of the business on their own and whose businesses haven't quite reached the point where they can step away from day-to-day operations. Once that point is reached, they become ever-more useless, even as they become ever-more prestigious.
@lykso Bingo! A part of me really wants to be inside of their head when they get an email like mine. Kind of short, to the point. Depending on my mood, it’s a little bit whimsical. For example, I recently wrote the phrase, I hope this email finds you eating a lot of grapes and other kinds of healthy fruit. Do they find it impossible to understand because it’s not filled with empty dribble and is 1 million times more actionable than a single paragraph they’ve ever created?
@WeirdWriter I think it's a mistake to assume they don't know exactly what they're doing. It's not so much a matter of capacity, for most of them, but rather a matter of complicity.
xrvs
David Gerard@WeirdWriter some people you just wanna yell "JUST SEND ME YOUR FUCKING PROMPT" except then you might hear from them ever again
i used to write this shit by writing what i actually thought, then translating back to business
@davidgerard Hahaha! Nailed it.
schrotthaufen@WeirdWriter @davidgerard I’m not a betting man, but in this case I’m willing to bet on the legal departments, and litigious asshats being at fault. Or the need to appear intelligent.
Rachel@WeirdWriter Bit long for a single paragraph but otherwise, damn right! What “leaders” say shouldn’t have to be decoded and translated in order to get any kind of meaning out of it.
@WeirdWriter A while back I got an answer from a senior leader -type at work, and after careful analysis it all boiled down to:
— a new policy is on the way
— she (the person telling us) is excited about the new policy
— they took away the jobs of some people at the email-sender’s department
No information at all on when the policy might be ready, what it might contain, or what the job losses have to do with anything.
@WeirdWriter I challenged the sender, showing them my analysis, and asking if I’d missed anything. I wasn’t even sure whether she knew that she’d said almost nothing.
@WeirdWriter So... You're saying "business emails could be done better?" ;)
Alan Bellingham@WeirdWriter Five word email is good. A ten word email must therefore be twice as good
Repeat until tired