Not all Corporate Communications (CC) writing is horrible. But much of it exists in a landscape of cliché and jargon-laden, passive-voiced, overly formal, and unpleasant-to-read verbal hardtack. Stodgy, flabby, and self-important CC writing destroys the power of your products, services, and thought-leading ideas.
Whether written or spoken, corporate communications provide the refuge where clichés, ramping-up phrases, and vapid verbal fillers go to thrive. These evil turns of phrase populate white papers, PowerPoint stacks, seminar presentations, marketing pitches, and all other corporate communications avenues. Through unthinking overuse, these power and persuasion-depleting verbal goons have conditioned you to assume they make you sound authoritative. For many reasons—none good—they result in a kind of Victorian-era formality that still passes for authority.
But when you give your readers active, energized, lean, and robust copy, they respond viscerally and intellectually. They may not be able to explain why they like what you write, but their emotions tell them that you’ve set yourself above the mediocre writing they’re used to getting. Your writing un-numbs them. It makes them like your writing itself and, more importantly, what you’re writing about—the products, the services, the people.