The Media Love Simple, Powerful Language

How is that phrase, "going forward"? Isn't it a beauty? You can't go backwards so why use the phrase in the first place. As a media trainer, I know why people use stuff like that - to feel more important. But, guess what? Both the media and the public absolutely hate buzz phrases like that.

In my country, our new leader cut short his media honeymoon period by embarking on a world tour and writing his own speeches that were laced with clichés, jargon and acronyms. In April 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Brookings Institute in Washington that: "The idea of a harmonious world depends on China being a participant in the world order and, along with others, acting in accordance with the rules of that order. Otherwise, harmony is impossible to achieve. Therefore, there is on the face of it a natural complementarity between the two philosophical approaches. And a complementarity that could be developed further in the direction of some form of conceptual synthesis."


What? This piece dismally fails what I call my town or city square rule. Walk into any town square, stop 10 people at random and ask them what that passage meant. I don't think even one person could explaint it. The point is that unless seven or eight of those people can understand your words, don't use them. Replace them with simpler words that will have more power and the ability to increase the reach of your message to many more people. Why would you make it hard for your readers, listeners or viewers to understand you? Our Prime Minister came home from his 18 day world our to headlines like: When it comes to plain speaking, the Prime Minister may be beyond help, What was that, PM? And Rudd says he's no robot yet he talks like one. Not good.

Mind you, Americans can be just as silly with their use of the language. The Agriculture Department, which has consistently used the word 'hunger' to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table, decided to use the phrase "very low food security" as a description for the 11 million people who go hungry at times!

Another pet hate of mine is the word "outcome". It's so common these days that it's almost a cliche and should be banned on those grounds alone. Whatever happened to the word result which sounds a lot simpler to me? I've actually media trained people who have later told me they went back to their jobs eager to use less stuffy language when presenting to colleagues and were thrilled at how much better they communicated and how much better it was received.

This stuff works with both media interviews and with other communications as well. After all, when you talk to a journalist you're really talking to the audience behind that journalist and there's little difference between that and talking to people in a social situation. If you think about it, the people at next week's dinner party, BBQ or other social event will be asking you similar questions to the ones the journalist asks you in a media interview and we tend to use simple language socially so why change it for a media interview. The journalist needs to be asking those sort of questions because they represent the public.

By: Graham Kelly

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The author has spent the past 22 years media training thousands of executives and one of his key messages to them has been to drop jargon, business speak and acronyms. He tells them to speak simply and powerfully to increase the reach of their messages. More details of Graham Kelly's media training or his latest media training book, Managing the Media 3rd Edition.

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