Friends, I have made my first official foray into corporate communications and I have incredibly strong opinions about it.

Before we get into the nitty gritty, let me say that from the (very) little that I’ve done with communications in a corporate setting, I love it. I love being able to utilize my writing skills in a meaningful way in my day job. I love being seen as a competent communicator. I especially love that even though it is a small fraction of my job description, I am getting paid what most of us Indie Fiction writers can only dream of for stringing a few sentences together. Ah, the perks of a Fortune 500 company paycheck.

That being said, Corporate America, what is up with this lexicon you’ve decided to saddle yourself with? I routinely see words like decisioning or wordsmithing or actioning. These impromptu verbs coupled with a few five dollar vocabulary words in the wrong context send my head absolutely spinning.

What’s worse is that these communications that I am contributing to routinely go to the upper echelons of management. This means Sr. Executives, Unit CIO’s, Boards of Directors, and others are enabling and encouraging this sort of communication.

I blame the “high-level overview” requirement for this sort of egging on. Essentially, this means that experts in a particular process or function are asked to describe what they do, but to ignore the details and give a generalized description, typically within a certain amount of words. It’s like asking Neil Degrasse Tyson to sum-up the workings of the universe in two sentences.

While I am sure that the great Neil Degrasse Tyson could accomplish this with finesse and grace, your typical corporate employee will struggle with this task. I think this is where the odd vocabulary comes into play. Words with a tenuous grasp on the concepts at hand infiltrate presentations and e-mails that are passed around to everyone in the company. Because of the high visibility, it stands to reason that more will emulate the verbiage and add in a few more five dollar vocabulary words that sound cool, end them with ing and call them verbs. Viola! We have words like Synergy and Actioning.

The same things happen with the youths of the world. Every generation has their own vocabulary and buzzwords. It was just shocking to me to understand that companies are the same way, except they try to dress up their slang in a suit and tie.

As an Indie Fiction writer, I am at once impressed and appalled by this corporate phenomenon. Impressed by the ingenuity it takes to make up verbs and also the single-minded determination to use these fabrications to “effectively” communicate with superiors. Appalled by the continuous perpetuation of words that make no sense by Sr. Executives and Boards of Directors.

I feel that with my entrance into the communications field that I need to address the pervasiveness of “Corporate Speak”. If we are to actually get our points across, we can do it in plain language instead of making stuff up to sound smarter than we are.

This, I think, is going to be my biggest problem to tackle should I continue this adventure in corporate communications. Well, and getting people to understand that while “wordsmith” is a cool title, I’d really prefer to simply be called what I am; a “writer”.