JARGON BUSTING: GET RID OF BRANDS, SUITES AND PORTFOLIOS
August 2nd 2009 12:13
Modern journalism is now becoming increasingly bogged down in jargon.
In the past, council minutes and police statements were often exercises in mind fuddling jargon and the media was usually quick to satires such verbose and obscure excesses.
But now the media embraces jargon rather than shies away from it.
Jargon, much of it emanating from marketing departments and the online industry, has infected modern media.
The print media, always in a drive to economize wordage and trim the fat, has now succumbed to the excessively verbose new speech of many online outlets. In the print world, newspaper space is valuable and limited, and in the past if something could be said effectively in three words instead of ten, vigorous editing was applied.
But space restriction is not an issue online, hence many writers tend to follow a credo of why use ten words, when 100 can be used.
For example, Marketing magazine recently advised, “In less than two years, AAAN has expanded the reach of its portfolio of channel brands throughout Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan to reach 3.5 million households.”
The offending passage is “the reach of its portfolio of channel brands throughout Southeast Asia.”
It would have been more effective to simply say “AAAN has expanded the reach of its channels.”
Portfolio and its cousin suite are new add-on words that now appear with regular monotony. People no longer own things or even a number of things: they own a portfolio or suite of things.
Then there is the much overused word, brands. Companies now longer own magazine, they own magazine brands. And, in the above example, AAAN now has “channels brands” rather than just channels.
And on its goes, ad nauseam.
In the past, council minutes and police statements were often exercises in mind fuddling jargon and the media was usually quick to satires such verbose and obscure excesses.
But now the media embraces jargon rather than shies away from it.
Jargon, much of it emanating from marketing departments and the online industry, has infected modern media.
The print media, always in a drive to economize wordage and trim the fat, has now succumbed to the excessively verbose new speech of many online outlets. In the print world, newspaper space is valuable and limited, and in the past if something could be said effectively in three words instead of ten, vigorous editing was applied.
For example, Marketing magazine recently advised, “In less than two years, AAAN has expanded the reach of its portfolio of channel brands throughout Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan to reach 3.5 million households.”
The offending passage is “the reach of its portfolio of channel brands throughout Southeast Asia.”
It would have been more effective to simply say “AAAN has expanded the reach of its channels.”
Portfolio and its cousin suite are new add-on words that now appear with regular monotony. People no longer own things or even a number of things: they own a portfolio or suite of things.
Then there is the much overused word, brands. Companies now longer own magazine, they own magazine brands. And, in the above example, AAAN now has “channels brands” rather than just channels.
And on its goes, ad nauseam.
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