Short and Easy

"It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’"                               

― A.A. Milne

Most often, your purpose in publishing is to inform and persuade. Why mask your meaning with long, difficult words?

Why say your product "will provide seamless multi-user functionality," when you mean it "supports up to 15 users?"

Why sound like some abstruse academic or dodgy bureaucrat?

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, " George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language."

Latin and Greek words are grand, but their use in business is dreadful.

Just look at this balderdash from Accenture:

Insurers will need to open up to their ecosystem partners, sharing not only customer data, but customers themselves. To encourage and support such ecosystems, IT architectures will need to evolve, ensuring flexibility and interoperability with external partners and providers. A key challenge will be to orchestrate innovation and legacy evolutions while simultaneously managing security threats and changing IT processes to roll out and manage new products and services faster and cheaper.

Acccenture means:

Insurance companies need to upgrade their IT systems so suppliers can use their customer data. But they can't let the changes interrupt routine business.

This morning's lesson: short and easy.

Now, what about lunch?