ghostwriter SERIES: office jargon

The Office and the English Language: Orwell

When I started to go independent, I realised I might be less exposed to office jargon. Which is both a blessing and a loss, as I do find people building on eachothers builds and being thanked in advance rather entertaining. And that got me thinking about it, which got me thinking about my next installment for my ghostwriter experiment - and so I asked AI to write about office jargon in the style of the one man who’d - were he alive - would surely have an opinion: George Orwell. 

Here was the prompt:

"Write about office jargon - why smart people still use it, and how to stop. Write it as George Orwell - the Orwell of 'Politics and the English Language’. Update his rules for the modern workplace. Be honest about why people use jargon - it protects them - but don't let them off the hook. Be useful, not just scornful - he has to actually help."

The result is below, with my notes at the end on where the machine gets him right — and where the impression shows.

Office jargon — written by Claude in the style of George Orwell

Most people who care about such things would admit that business language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that nothing can be done about it, the way one assumes nothing can be done about the weather. Our offices are full of sentences like this one, which I take from a document sent to me last week:

"Going forward, we will leverage cross-functional synergies to operationalise our learnings and drive alignment around key deliverables."

Translated, this means: we will talk to the other department. Eleven words have been spent where six would do, and not one of the eleven was chosen. They arrived. That is the first thing to understand about this kind of writing: it is not written at all, in any sense that matters. Phrases like drive alignment and key deliverables are prefabricated, like sections of a chicken coop. The writer bolts them together in the order they always go, and the sentence assembles itself while his mind is elsewhere. This is the great convenience of jargon, and the great danger of it. Ready-made phrases will build your sentences for you, and then they will think your thoughts for you, and the only price is that you are absent from both.

If that were the whole of it, jargon would merely be ugly. But notice what the language is doing as well as how it sounds. A company does not fire eighty people; it rightsizes. A manager does not say I decided; he says the decision was taken, in the passive voice, as if the decision had walked in off the street. An employee is let go, as though he had been straining at the leash and was at last, mercifully, released. Each phrase performs the same operation: it removes the human actor from the sentence. And language that removes the actor exists to remove the responsibility. When something unpleasant must be done, the words arrive first to dig the hiding place. In politics I called this the defence of the indefensible. In the office it is smaller, but it is the same instinct: the lie is not in the facts, which are usually available, but in the fog.

Now the honest part, which the scornful always skip. People do not write this way because they are stupid. They write this way because plain language is exposed language. The man who says I don't know stands in the open; the man who says we're still aligning on that speaks from behind a wall. Jargon is armour, and in many offices the armour is rational, because plain speech gets punished and fog gets promoted. I will not pretend otherwise. I will only say what every soldier knows: armour worn long enough stops being something you wear. The costume becomes the skin. The young account manager who reaches for learnings ironically at twenty-six will reach for it sincerely at thirty, and by forty he will no longer be able to say what he means, because the apparatus for meaning things has quietly rusted shut.

The cure is not a style guide. It is a habit of suspicion, applied one sentence at a time, and these rules will serve:

• Never use a phrase you first met in someone else's deck.

• If a short word does the work, the long word is hiding something. Find out what.

• Cut every word that can be cut, beginning with going forward, which has never once changed the meaning of a sentence it infested.

• Use the passive only when you truly do not know who acted. If you know, name them — especially when the actor is you.

• Never use jargon where an everyday equivalent exists. If you cannot find the everyday equivalent, stop: you have discovered a thought you have not actually had yet.

• Break any of these rules sooner than write a sentence no one could possibly disagree with. A sentence no one could disagree with is a sentence that says nothing, and saying nothing at length is the whole industry I am writing against.

None of this requires courage of any grand kind. It requires only the small, repeatable act of asking, before you send the thing: who is doing what to whom in this sentence, and why have I dressed them? Plain words are not a style. They are a politics — the modest, daily refusal to let the fog in. The fog never announces itself. It comes in phrase by phrase, each one a little easier than thinking, and the only defence I know of is the next sentence, written awake.

My notes, as the human in the room:

This is the first one where I can actually check the working, because Orwell really did write about this - an essay called "Politics and the English Language," in 1946. So I'm not guessing at what he'd think. I can hold the AI's version up against the real one.

The diagnosis holds up, which is the depressing part. Everything he flagged is still here: the off-the-shelf phrases, the passive voice people hide behind, and the way the words go vague at the exact moment someone's dodging the blame. Eighty years on and almost nothing has changed. It's just office jargon now instead of political jargon.

What the AI misses is why he cared. Orwell was angry because he'd watched this kind of language cover up real, awful things. The machine copies the scorn but not the reason for it, so its Orwell comes across like he's enjoying himself - being clever about buzzwords. The real Orwell wasn't enjoying it. To him this stuff was how lies got dressed up as respectable, and that frightened him.

The bit I keep coming back to: I asked an AI to tell off corporate language. An AI - the one thing that's read more all-hands invites and "quick syncs" than anything alive. It knows this language from the inside, which is probably why it's so good at doing the man who hated it. It doesn't really read like mockery. More like it's fluent in the exact thing it's meant to be attacking.