How to breathe fresh life into trite corporate copy
Just as Big Brother used ‘Newspeak’ to diminish expressive language in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ companies today seem stuck on stilted speech. Here’s how to write livelier prose.
When’s the last time you tucked into “Nineteen Eighty-Four?”
If you’ve read George Orwell’s dystopian classic, you probably remember Newspeak: the state-mandated language in which, for example, nothing is “bad” but rather “ungood” (or “doubleplusungood” in extreme cases).
The purpose of Newspeak is to shrink the English vocabulary and deliberately make the language less expressive. As words vanish, so does the public’s capacity to think.
As Syme, a brainwashed character in Orwell’s masterpiece, says: “You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
This got me thinking about the language used by companies, charities and other organizations. The homogeneity, the jargon, the shrinking range of word choices—and ideas.
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