I have a particularly busy week ahead and everyone in my family (me included) is coming down with a cold. Not a good combo. So I’m falling back on a blogger’s trick: I’m re-running a post from three years ago. (Yes, it’s okay to do that from time to time, as long as the topic is still relevant.)

This mini case study from Starbucks provides an excellent lesson of how NOT to write.

When Starbucks passed out pink slips to 100 workers, they called in the big guns (aka, company spokeswoman Anna Kim-Williams) to deliver the bad news.

The spokeswoman’s prepared statement said:

“Some of these partners are being offered opportunity for redeployment and others will be separated from the company.”

Partners?
Redeployment?
Separated?

Talk about a decaf statement!

The “partners” she refers to are human resources and security workers.

And “redeployment”? Give me a (coffee) break! Are these “partners” in the Army? Why didn’t she just say, “the workers might be transferred”?

“Separated from the company.” We all know what that means. Laid off. Axed. You’re outta here!

I can understand Starbucks attempting to soften the blow and call as little public attention to the layoffs as possible. But let’s swallow the bitter coffee: Starbucks employees have known for months that they might get laid off. The public has known for weeks that the layoffs were coming. So add a double shot to my vanilla latte and tell it like it is:

We’re sorry to announce that we laid off 100 workers. When the economy improves, some of them may eventually be reassigned to other departments, but most of these folks are dead wood, so they’re outta here.

To heap even more verbose pain and suffering on the laid-off employees (excuse me–partners), the head of human resources (check out his cool job title below) sent the following memo to them:

A Message from Chet Kuchinad: Workforce Reduction in Partner Resources and Partner & Asset Protection

Dear Partners,

As we communicated on January 28, Starbucks is reshaping our operating model and organization structure to ensure the long-term health of our business. This includes the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our global workforce.

As part of our commitment to transparency throughout this process, we wanted to inform you that approximately 100 non-store partners (including Partner Resources and Partner & Asset Protection) are being notified today that their positions have been eliminated. About 40 of those partners are located at the Starbucks Support Center (SSC) in Seattle.

You may be wondering why these groups are being notified this week if we have not yet notified other displaced partners. PRO and P&AP have unique responsibilities supporting internal client groups during a workforce reduction. Due to the organizational changes in these groups, we felt it respectful to inform these partners now, prior to our broader notification day in mid-February. For partners in a few international markets, this may be somewhat later in order to comply with local employment laws.

We are thankful and proud of the contributions our partners make to the organization, and we are committed to treating all partners with respect and dignity — those who are departing Starbucks and those who will stay.

We recognize this period of uncertainty is unsettling for all partners. We commit to communicating openly with partners as soon as we are able.

Regards,
Chet Kuchinad,
evp, Partner Resource

Well. I certainly feel unsettled. Does Chet honestly believe he’s communicating in English, or is he practicing some internal Starbucksese (similar to Vulcan…or Klingon?).

Here’s your latte challenge, readers:

In the Comments area of this post, re-write Chet’s memo in plain English. Try to condense his 236-word statement to 50 words or less.

Have at it!

Source:
“Starbucks Lays off 100 Office Workers,” by Melissa Allison, Seattle Times, Feb 5, 2009.

This is not the same pig featured in Consumer Reports, but it's close (this pig is much cuter).

The November issue of Consumer Reports just arrived, and my 15-year-old son and I raced to see who could flip to the inside back cover fastest (he won).

The last page of the magazine features bloopers: misspellings in advertisements, missing words, and other unintended turns of phrase that make us giggle. Okay, they make us laugh uproariously.

This month’s issue features a “House for Sale” sign posted next to an outhouse.

But our favorite is the cute, cuddly pink stuffed piggy that looks like a teddy bear with a snout on it. Perfect for your toddler!

The fabric care tag reads:

“Only Clean With Damn Sponge.”

Here’s another strange turn of phrase that my husband heard on the radio. I’m not going to provide the context, but if you correctly guess what this phrase means, I’ll send you a free copy of my e-book, Blogophobia Conquered ($20 value).

“The littlest yards loom the largest.”

Let’s have fun with this. Guess away! First two people to guess correctly get free books.

That fella’s the raspberry seed in my wisdom tooth.

–The Music Man

You can almost feel it, can’t you? That tiny, irritating raspberry seed lodged in your tooth (or worse yet, in your gums).

A good metaphor or simile breathes life into a sentence. It helps the reader’s mind make fresh correlations between smells, sounds, taste, touch.

A bad metaphor kills the sentence deader than a chainsaw murderer wielding a plastic chainsaw from Toys R Us. Get the idea?

Here’s a mini refresher course on the difference between a metaphor and a simile:

• Metaphor - a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money)
• Simile – Using like or as to compare two unlike things (as in cheeks like roses)

One of the best places to find funny figures of speech is in student-written essays. Here are some ‘winners’ from excerpts submitted by English teachers across the U.S. (vote for your favorites!)

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides
   gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
   underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes
   just before it throws up.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
   room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
6. McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
   filled with vegetable soup.
7. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
8. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
9. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one
   that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
10. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil,
    this plan just might work.
11. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating
    for a while.
12. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but
    a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or
    something.
13. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg
    behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
14. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because
    of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a
    formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
15. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with
    power tools.
16. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a
    bowling ball wouldn’t.
17. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the
    grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left
    Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19
    p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
18. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as
    if she were a garbage truck backing up.
19. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Which one made you laugh hardest?

Challenge: Compose the most painful metaphor or simile you can. Share it in the Comments area.

“…These cars are heavily incentivized…”

Incentivized?

I’ve heard of “offering incentives.”

But incentivized?  I had to check it out. Sure enough, it’s in the dictionary, and it means “to give incentives to.” Another form of the verb is incentivizing (what a mouthful!).

I stand corrected. Incentivized really is a word. But is it the appropriate word to use when advertising cars — or anything, for that matter?

I hate it when people use big, impressive-sounding words when small ones will do.

What could the car salesman have said instead of, “These cars are heavily incentivized”?

How about:

• Buy this car today, and you’ll get a $2,000 rebate.
• Our cars are priced to sell.
• No one is buying our cars during this recession, and we’re panicking. To keep from going out of business, we’re offering you the best discount ever.

OK, that last one probably wouldn’t work, even though it’s closest to the truth.

Which brings up another jargony phrase that drives me nuts:  economic downturn.

Sounds so soft, palatable, and hopeful, doesn’t it? We all know we’re in the middle of a recession; just call it what it is!

Then there’s leverage.

Whenever I attend business meetings, people talk about leveraging this and that. The word started out as a noun that means “power or ability to influence people, events, decisions,” or “to get a high return off one’s investment.”  Now converted into a verb, it’s batted around in the marketing world like a beach ball. People must think “leveraging” makes them sound important and educated.

Yes, I understand it’s easier to say, “Let’s leverage our investment” instead  of, “Let’s shoot for a high return on our investment.”

But it would comfort me to hear people speaking like human beings and not robots.

Here are more hundred dollar words I detest:

• Irrefutably: Michael Phelps is irrefutably the world record holder in several swimming events.
• I concur: I concur with your hypothesis, Sherlock.
• Wherewithal and doggedly: The detective had the wherewithal to doggedly pursue the kidnapper.
• Precipitate and hereby: Your actions hereby precipitate a lawsuit.

…And even more jargon bandied about at a conference I recently attended:

• Knowledge worker set
• Change management
• Best practices
• Green space
• End users
• Information assets
• Enterprise space
• Social technologies

Your turn! What hundred dollar words grate like fingers on a chalkboard? How many can you cram into one sentence?

The Custodian shall vote all shares that are held in the Participant’s custodial Account on the applicable record date for which proper instructions have not been timely received from the Participant in the same proportion as the Custodian has been instructed to vote the shares in other custodial accounts for which it serves as custodian for which it has received timely instructions from depositors.

What’s wrong with this prose?

EVERYTHING!

The entire paragraph is one sentence.

Bad, bad, bad. The above sentence is 64 words. Waaaay too long.

• When you draft prose, whether it’s an amendment to the Constitution or a sentence in a novel, keep your sentence lengths manageable.
• Try opening with an extremely short sentence (one-word, two-word or three-word sentences really pop), and following up with a lengthier sentence.

The sentence uses legalese.

Pet peeve alert! Legalese – the “insider” jargon people use within a particular industry – drives me nuts. So much so that I wrote an entire blog post called, “10 popular phrases you must immediately delete from your writing.”

Why can’t they speak plain English? After all, the audience for this so-called information is me, the retirement fund owner.

The company that mailed this piece to me put the amendment on a separate postcard, all by itself. They must have thought it was really, really important. I’ve read this piece at least five times, and cannot make heads or tails of it. If you can’t say it in plain, simple English, don’t say it at all.

How would you rewrite this piece?

Your assignment: Collect samples of Putrid Prose and send them to me. If I feature your sample, I’ll include a short bio about you and a link to your site. Let’s have fun with this!

“One of my former reporters once wrote a story about an after-school learning program at the middle school. It quoted a source as saying:

“We plan to give these students the torturing and intervention they need.”

The reporter told me, “I’m sure she meant to write tutoring and not torturing, though the latter may have been more appropriate.”

Your turn! Submit funny examples of Putrid Prose you see or hear, along with a short bio about you and a link to your site. If I feature your submission, I’ll link to your site.

The following sentence appeared in a published memoir:

I challenged him to a hundred yard run with the steakes being a stake dinner for two at the restaurant of the winner’s choice.

The writer demonstrates a common problem: homophone confusion. No, a homophone is not a new kind of smart phone; homophones are words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently.

The sentence above has two problems:

1. The author misspelled steaks (the meat you eat for dinner).
2. The author confused the meaning of steaks and stakes.

The sentence should read:

I challenged him to a hundred yard run with the stakes being a steak dinner for two at the restaurant of the winner’s choice.

Whether/Weather you’re/your writing/righting a blog post, a Facebook update, or/ore a book, be/bee aware of tricky homophones!

Your turn! Submit funny examples of Putrid Prose you see or hear, along with a short bio about you and a link to your site. If I feature your submission, I’ll link to your site.

“When I was a little girl, I had a fragrant disregard for taking my shoes off when I entered my house.”

The deejay must have had stinky feet when she was younger — which would account for her fragrant disregard.

She meant to say flagrant (which means blatant).

Your turn! Submit funny examples of Putrid Prose you see or hear, along with a short bio about you and a link to your site.  If I feature your submission, I’ll link to your site.

Here is one author’s response to a couple of questions, copied verbatim from his survey:

How will you help promote your book?

I wouldn’t have a clue. I am the worse salesman in the world.

Has your writing been published in any publications?

Oh no, I’ve hand writen stuf,but nobody could get past the first two paragraphs because they were to buisy laughing at my spelling and grammer.

Okay, proofreaders… have at it! How many errors can you find in the author’s responses?

What advice would you give to this aspiring author?

• Toilet out of order. Please use floor below. (My sons do that… and our toilet works.)

On a readerboard outside a pre-school:

• This sign intentionally left blank, just like your child’s mind. (Should parents interpret this as a compliment or an insult?)

In an office break room:

• After tea break staff should empty the teapot and stand upside down on the draining board. (That’ll help the caffeine go directly to your head.)

In a London department store:

• Bargain Basement Upstairs (Is that like going up the down staircase?)

In our elementary school’s newsletter:

• Sharing reasons not to smoke with your child (I don’t know about you, but I insist that my kids smoke by themselves.)

From an author’s “elevator pitch” for his new book:

• It is great in deed; you can oder it. (This author’s humble prose stinks.)

Share some of your faves!