Or: how to say nothing at all in five hundred words, professionally
Somewhere in the last few decades, professional English developed a parasite. It doesn’t help you communicate. It replaces communication with the appearance of communication, at considerably greater length. Here, in the spirit of public service, is a complete guide to producing it.
Step one: nominalise everything. Never say a verb when a noun phrase will do. ‘We decided’ becomes ‘a decision-making process was undertaken.’ ‘We’re improving this’ becomes ‘an optimisation initiative is being actioned.’ The verb was doing useful work, carrying the actual meaning of the sentence. Removing it and replacing it with an abstract noun achieves nothing except length, which is, of course, the entire point.
Step two: never use one word where three will do. ‘Use’ becomes ‘utilise.’ ‘Now’ becomes ‘at this moment in time.’ ‘Help’ becomes ‘facilitate the process of supporting.’ None of these synonyms are wrong exactly. They’re simply longer, and length, worn correctly, reads as seriousness. A sentence that takes longer to say sounds like it took longer to think, even when it took considerably less.
Step three: master the art of saying absolutely nothing in five hundred words. This is the advanced technique. The goal is a document that appears, on a skim, to contain a decision, while containing none. ‘Moving forward, it is anticipated that stakeholder alignment on core deliverables will be prioritised in the context of evolving strategic imperatives’ is a sentence that has said, definitionally, nothing. Nobody can act on it, disagree with it, or hold anyone accountable to it, which is frequently the intended function.
Step four: utilise synergistic paradigm alignments wherever feasible. By this point you’ll have noticed the pattern: every genuine improvement to the sentence has made it shorter, plainer, and more useful, and every step in this guide has made it worse on all three counts simultaneously. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the actual mechanism.
A brief return to seriousness. The reason this is worth mocking, rather than just noting, is that the instinct to write this way is genuinely strong at C1+, especially in business and academic contexts, since padded, formal-sounding language feels safer than a direct, simple sentence that might be wrong. It rarely is. ‘We decided to delay the launch’ is a complete, correct, professional sentence. It doesn’t need a decision-making process undertaken anywhere near it. Clear, direct communication isn’t a lesser register than the padded version, it’s simply harder to hide behind, which is usually why the padded version gets chosen instead.
I’ve built a genuinely useful lesson plan out of this one too: a jargon-spotting hunt through real documents, and a ten-word rewrite challenge. Download the Spotting and Fixing Corporate Jargon lesson plan (PDF).