The tide of bullshit is rising.
Your email inbox is full of irrelevant, poorly written crap. Your boss talks in jargon and clichés. The websites you read are impenetrable and incomprehensible.
Bullshit is a burden on all of us, keeping us from getting useful work done.
Technology has made it breathtakingly easy for anybody to create content and distribute it to thousands of people. Unfortunately, nobody told those creators what it takes to create good content, so weâre stuck wading through a deluge of drivel.
You know this is a problem. Iâm here to tell you that itâs also an opportunity.
Imagine for a moment that you could write boldly, clearly, and powerfully every time you sat down at the keyboard. When your email showed up in your colleaguesâ inboxes, it would pop. Reports you wrote would get people to sit up and take notice. Customers would respond to your marketing copy. Youâd earn a reputation as a straight talker.
Why arenât you doing this yet? I know why. Iâve worked with thousands of people just like you, people who work in offices and need to communicate in their jobs. Hereâs whatâs stopping themâand youâfrom clearing away the bullshit and writing clearly.
First, you got the wrong training. In high school and college, you learned to write verbose prose to fool teachers into believing you knew what you were talking about. Those teachers implicitly taught you that bullshitting was effective.
Then, when you started working, you found yourself immersed in more babble. From the moment you sat down and read the employee manual, you were sunk. You took your cues from the people around you, people who didnât tend to tell the plain truth when they wrote things.
Finally, you learned that avoiding risk was paramount. Clarity can be dangerous because people who read what you wrote might disagree with it.
If youâre okay with being a mindless component in the vast bullshit machine that is the business world, please put this book down and walk away. You can keep writing equivocal garbage, and youâll fit in just fine.
But if youâd prefer to stand out, I can show you how. Itâs not that hard. In fact, itâs mostly a matter of connecting with your own natural ways of communicating.
Iâll show you whatâs motivating you to write the way you do and whatâs stopping you from writing more clearly. Every single bad habit youâve learned is tied up with your own psychology at work. As I teach you to express yourself more powerfully, Iâll clear away the motivational roadblocks that are stopping you. Once you understand that psychology, youâll be on your way to making a far more powerful impression.
I will give you the courage to say what you mean.
Then Iâll give you the skills, teach you the tricks, and show you how to organize your day so you get the chance to show that courage in everything you write.
If you have good ideas and express them well in writing, youâll get credit for those ideas and their clarity. Youâll also get credit for your candor and integrity. Not only is that good for your career, but it feels good, too.
The Iron Imperative
Letâs agree on one principle. This principle powers everything else in this book. I call it the Iron Imperative:
Treat the readerâs time as more valuable than your own.
That couldnât be simpler. And yet everything thatâs wrong with the way businesspeople write today stems from ignoring this principle.
A marketer creates a website to describe her company. Sheâs on a deadline and has to get input from multiple people. Eventually she gives up and cobbles together some prose that has everybodyâs fingerprints on it. Is her top priority the readerâs time? No, itâs getting the text into the site by the deadline.
A coworker emails you and a dozen others about a problem in your department. He puts down the elements in the order that they occur to him. The subject line is âI was just thinking.â Heâs been very efficient with his own time. Is he respecting your time, too? Nope.
An analyst assembles a report to justify the actions that a city should take. He knows there will be lots of objections, and he doesnât want to sound stupid, so he includes as many justifications as possible and couches everything in passive language that hides whoâs responsible for any actions he recommends. He has covered his ass in a very sophisticated way. Has he considered the readerâs time? Not a chance.
These people arenât inherently selfish. Theyâre just busy. When youâre busy, you worry more about yourself and your deadlines. You create text to fill spaces and do jobs. It turns out that itâs not so easy to just write clear, bold prose every time. So you do the best you can.
Unfortunately, each small step toward expediency erodes your own sense of integrity. You are no longer saying what you mean. That takes a moral toll on you even as it wastes your readersâ time.
This waste is even worse than it appears because weâre all reading nearly all the time now. Weâre continually consuming massive amounts of this indifferent prose, and weâre doing so on glass screens that donât make reading easy. Weâre surrounded by distractions.
Thatâs why the world seems to be so full of bullshitâbecause weâre drowning in text that was slapped together without a focus on meaning and directness.
The Iron Imperative sounds like a good idea. But even if you accept it, how can you actually put it into practice?
Measuring Meaning
When you read something that is meaningful, you learn something. You could learn what Elon Musk thinks about artificial intelligence, how much rain is going to fall in the next 24 hours, or what database strategy makes sense for your company. Meaning makes you smarter.
When I talk about bullshit, I have something very specific in mind. Itâs prose that makes you go, âHuh?â Bullshit is communication that wastes the readerâs time by failing to communicate clearly and accurately. While that includes outright lies, lies are not the biggest problem in business communication. The biggest problem is lack of clarity. Jargon, overuse of qualifying words like âveryâ and âdeeply,â confusing passive sentences, poorly organized thinking, and just general rambling on: thatâs bullshit. Those are constructions that hide meaning rather than reveal it.
Because of this definition, I can actually measure bullshit. To do this, I take any passage of text and identify the words that have no real meaning. Letâs take a look at an example.
Inovalon is a healthcare technology company based in Maryland. On its website, under âWho We Are,â is this description:
Inovalon is a leading technology company that combines advanced cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms to achieve meaningful insight and impact in clinical and quality outcomes, utilization, and financial performance across the healthcare landscape. Inovalonâs unique achievement of value is delivered through the effective progression of Turning Data into Insight, and Insight into ActionÂź. Large proprietary datasets, advanced integration technologies, sophisticated predictive analytics, data-driven intervention platforms, and deep subject matter expertise deliver a seamless, end-to-end capability that brings the benefits of big data and large-scale analytics to the point of care.
To everyone outside Inovalon (and, I suspect, many inside the company), this is pretty hard to parse. But just how bad is it? Letâs highlight the words that donât have meaning for most readers. Iâll use bold to highlight the qualifying words that donât have a precise meaning, such as âveryâ and âleading.â Iâll also highlight words and phrases that are basically just decoration to make the description sound more impressive, such as âutilizationâ and âacross the healthcare landscape.â As for the jargon thatâs bound to confuse most readers, Iâll use bold italic to highlight that.
Now the passage looks like this:
Inovalon is a leading technology company that combines advanced cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms to achieve meaningful insight and impact in clinical and quality outcomes, utilization, and financial performance across the healthcare landscape. Inovalonâs unique achievement of value is delivered through the effective progression of Turning Data into Insight, and Insight into ActionÂź. Large proprietary datasets, advanced integration technologies, sophisticated predictive analytics, data-driven intervention platforms, and deep subject matter expertise deliver a seamless, end-to-end capability that brings the benefits of big data and large-scale analytics to the point of care.
While you can quibble about the specific words Iâve chosen to highlight, we can agree that there is just too much jargon and meaningless verbiage in this passage. How much? We measure that with the meaning ratio:
There are 92 words in this passage. Iâve marked 38 as not meaningful, which means only 54 are meaningful. The meaning ratio of this passage is 59%.
Thatâs dreadful.
Nearly half of these words are getting in the way rather than helping.
An ideal passage, of course, would have a meaning ratio of 100%. A passage with a meaning ratio of 80% is readable. But once you get below 70%, youâre in bullshit territory. This passage reads as bullshit because nearly half of it is not communicating anything useful.
Iâm going to poke fun at lots of awful language in this book. But Iâm actually out to solve the problem, not just laugh at it. So imagine for a moment that Inovalon has hired you to make its mission statement better. You might come up with something like this:
Inovalon has more insight into health data than anyone else. We analyze that data and apply the knowledge to help you improve care options, reduce costs, and improve compliance. We help hospitals, doctors, insurance payers, and patients. We identify gaps in care, quality, and data integrity, and apply our unique capabilities to resolving them.
Weâve reduced 92 words to 54. By using words like âweâ and âyou,â Inovalon tells its customers what the company does and how it helps those customers. Ordinary humans, even healthcare information professionals, can easily understand what âgaps in care, quality, and data integrityâ are. Weâve restored the missing meaning by getting rid of the bullshit.
One Womanâs Path from Powerful, Direct Communication to Success
Can writing without bullshit boost your career? Intuitively, weâd like to be the kinds of people who say what we mean when we write. But does it make a difference?
Iâve been lucky to interact with dozens of great communicators in my career. Iâm not talking about professional writers, either. Iâm talking about intelligent, hardworking folks who found that candor was their ticket to success.
For example, thereâs Diane Hessan. Diane got an MBA and then went to work at General Foods, where she was a product manager for Brim coffee. She took what she learned and joined a small training company called the Forum Corporation as product manager for their sales training product.
At Forum, a mentor named John Humphrey taught her how to communicate as efficiently as possible. His key principle in any discussion was simple: âNet it out in three clear points.â In other words, what does the reader or listener really need to know, and letâs not get mired in the details. Hessan learned that with impatient colleagues and skeptical customers, you have to get to the main point quickly. Taking this principle to heart, Hessan quickly grew the sales training product into a large, successful business.
She also got a reputation.
She told me about a team of people who were working late on a proposal for a client and asked to run the proposal by her. It wasnât quite up to snuff. Before offering her opinion, she asked, âDo you want to know what I really think?â The room burst out laughing because everyone knew they didnât have...