Experiments in style: the corporate statement version

An exercise in translation -- from gobbledygook to plain English

Drawn by Dall-E

Introduction

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into completely different styles. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

In today’s experiment I’d like to write the story as if it were a corporate press release or statement¹. See how many jargon words you can find. First, though, here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

The Corporate Statement version

Here at Freedman Towers we take our corporate and environmental responsibilities seriously. To that end, last year we implemented a system of credible metrics by which to hold ourselves to account. We are proud to say that we delivered an average of two bathroom visits per night, enabling us to optimise our sleep, comfort and health parameters. It is our aim to drive forward our agenda, to which end we have pledged to minimise our intake of affordable lifestyle beverage² before retiring for the night.

Unfortunately, a recent non-permanent proprioceptive malfunction, occasioned by a sub-optimal level of wakefulness and a failure to avail ourselves of the lighting facilities, resulted in our banging our head on a wall instead of going through the door in order to achieve our bathroom-related ambition. This misalignment between ends and means sadly led to a temporary downturn in cognitive abilities.

Although we attempted to maintain and indeed surpass the wordage-per-day output of which we are justly proud, it became clear that it would be necessary to activate a dialogue between ourselves and a representative of the medical profession.

In our visit to the appropriate facilities we noticed a general predilection for ignoring the rules pertaining to social distancing and mask-wearing. We have therefore written a strongly-worded letter on the matter to the Chief Medical Officer.

However, thanks to this country’s wonderful health professionals as well as our commitment to prioritising key achievements in several written communication-related areas we were able to leverage the downtime to progress the consumption of our book by several percentage points, culminating in a robust milestone of seventeen percent. In addition, we have received assurances that there would be no need to attempt to artificially counter the effects of the accident. However, should any doubts arise we are advised to initiate a bilateral telephonic meeting³ with our local doctor.

Moving forward, we have initiated measures to incentivise the use of lighting where appropriate in order to tackle avoidable contretemps.

Did you enjoy reading this? (Perhaps “enjoy” is not the most apposite word.) The interesting aspect of the English government’s style guide⁴ is the regularity with which it is ignored — by the government.

This version was inspired by this article:

The disease is almost universal, and the fight against it endless

Although I subscribe to this newsletter, written by

Shaun Usher

I had missed this particular issue. Many thanks to

Rebecca Holden

for drawing my attention to it.

By the way, if you don’t subscribe, why not?

I’m maintaining an index of the styles in which I’ve written this story.

1. I should like to thank the government in England for providing a handy guide to corporate jargon: Words to avoid.

2. ie water. See Affordable portable lifestyle beverage on Lucy Kellaway’s Guffpedia website.

3. ie phone call. See Guffpedia again.

4. See footnote #1.