A note from a friend about a grammatical error coincided with a lot of layoffs, which got me thinking about when word choice makes all the difference in comms, and when it doesn’t. Two months later, I still don’t really know. But here it goes.
This much is certain. There’s an inverse law of comms: the less word choice makes a difference, the more people will debate the word choice.
Now, of course, word choice and grammar always matter. But there are times when words can change things by 10% and times they can change them by 90%. The best comms people I’ve worked with knew when words didn’t matter and focused all their career capital on creating actions that would communicate things to their skeptical audience louder than words ever could.
Students go into the crisis-communications course in IESE thinking they’re going to learn how to draft statements that spin problems away like Dorothy’s house from Kansas. They soon learn that all that has ever mattered in the wake of a crisis is what you do to whom.
When I see comms people criticizing a cloth-eared statement, I think of it as a ritual blood letting of an innocent. We sacrifice it to the gods of comms, in the hopes that we won’t have to send a note like that, even if, in the end, we almost certainly will.
Cancer, breakups, layoffs, sexual harassment from a top exec and gigantic data leaks, they’re all the same in one sense. What not to say about them is so much easier to express than what to say. Words can't do much about the sadness. Sad: the email about the layoff, filled with lawyer-approved jargon. Sadder: Comms professionals critiquing the announcement emails on LinkedIn, the passive voices, the BS, the tone, the evasiveness, the lack of empathy are basically unavoidable. Saddest: the optimistic notes from the laid off on LinkedIn, which feel like me when I have a groin-rendering slip on the basketball court in front of my children, and I have to stride around confidently like the big parent I am when I’m almost in tears.
I’ve been at every end of this process. I’ve crafted the layoff memos from the CEO that sucked for the recipients to read (even if they objectively achieved the comms goal). I’ve received the layoff memo that sucked. I’ve written that post-layoff LinkedIn post that sucked. And yet, maybe this is how it is meant to be. Maybe, there is no comms to be done here. Layoffs suck and everything about them should probably suck, too.
Which brings me to the note from the writer (and friend) Sean Carlson two months ago, after I was killing myself for missing a host of bad grammatical errors in a post:
"Your syntax errors and grammatical oversights raise another interesting angle: the power of the gist v. the power of perfection. I found in my professional experiences there's an inequality built into some of this: more junior members of teams can be dinged or viewed critically for the same kind of typo/mistake that a more senior member of a team makes, perhaps even more regularly!"
This hit home immediately. I've had bosses who sent me revisions that bordered on incomprehensible — misspelled words, sentence fragments, mysterious abbreviations, and the comment “Made some edits, what do you think?” “What cat ran across your keyboard?” would be my initial reaction. Yet, as I squinted, I could make out where they were pointing, and it was usually a much better place than I had been headed. Their insight was valuable and beyond words.
Meanwhile, I've watched junior team members get crucified for a misplaced comma.
What's happening here? It’s the eloquence of action, which has its own comms grammar and its own comms need for precise copy editing.
A lot of effort gets wasted on wordsmithing that should be focused on the soul of the moment, which might not even be possible to put into words. The best poets have struggled with this and often given up, so perhaps comms people should, too. Tennyson wrote in a heart-breaking poem:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
What Sean calls the gist is often 90% of what you’re trying to communicate: I love you, I mourn you, You’re fired. Every word you add risks obscuring as much as it reveals.
Some of the best comms managers I’ve worked with, and especially the leaders outside of comms with amazing PR instincts, had an amazing sense of the bold act, one that was as sure as any copy-editor’s sense for the misplaced adjective. There have been moments when knowing the difference between infer and imply have actively hurt my career: not because I was wrong, but because I misjudged where my attention should have been. Before we open our mouths, is there an action that can say it all better?
The boss with the fast, imperfectly phrased but good-enough gist beats the blandly polite but unclear manager who expresses in more words a lesser course of action. The great, well-designed product flies off the shelves whether or not the blog post calls it “amazing” or “delightful.” A stammering executive I worked with broke almost every rule of executive presence but could win every room they entered, thanks to a mind like a nail gun that could shoot three-word ideas into your head and have them lodge there. In many of these cases, the gist, the soul of the moment is what made everything work. And often comms’s greatest contribution is in identifying it, extracting it and labelling it.
Comms can wreck the gist of the moment. One particularly nasty habit is a universal freak out about “corp speak” and “jargon.” Yes, corporate buzzwords can cloud meaning. They’re also the best-available words for the essence of what is happening, picked by the people who actually made the product. It is easy to mock VC-targeted prose poems like “distributed-cloud-SaaS-on-the-blockchain.” But these weird word patterns often contain a gist that comms people miss as they “translate it.” The word “ecosystem,” for instance, in the tech world is a genuine, if hand-wavy, attempt to express a situation where a lot of different people depend on each other to use a product. I’ve seen quite a few comms people declare to befuddled engineers that they’re talking nonsense and change “ecosystem” to “market” or, worse, “country.” I’ve also seen new comms people be outraged by the use of the word “market” – “Please! Don’t show your greed! You mean a country!” – get into trouble because, in a weird form of geopolitical spell weaving, when you call a certain place a country a shit storm forms on the horizon instantly. People don’t always use jargon to sound smart or pretentious, but comms people tend to assume they always do. If people are inarticulate in their use of words, it’s up to comms people to understand the gist before they reach for the thesaurus.
Ignoring a gist can also be risky. Perversely, I’ve seen comms peoples’ attempts to humanize and add empathy to layoff notices backfire, simply because it felt excessive. Molly Graham has an excellent post from the early stages of the tech layoffs about how tempting it is to speak in a “human” way. Yet when bosses bring their emotions to the comms, it is inappropriate. This is never about the boss’s emotion. The layoff note should give meaning to the people that survived the layoffs, leave some room for grief, and (this is where the action is everything) trying to set expectations about the future. Ultimately, the most effective comms people make sure the layoffs are done the right way before drafting anything.
When meaningful action is strong, form becomes invisible. Surface perfection can't redeem empty meaning.
The next time you find yourself nitpicking someone's grammar or presentation style, ask yourself: am I engaging with the substance of what they're saying, or am I using surface critiques to avoid deeper engagement?
And the next time you're crafting a message — whether it's a layoff announcement or a love letter — worry less about formal correctness and more about congruence. Does how you're saying it match what you're saying? Does the form reinforce or undermine the gist?
Because ultimately, as much as I value a well-placed semicolon, I've never seen anyone's life changed by punctuation. But I've seen plenty of lives changed by messages where gist, meaning, and form achieved that magical quality of perfect congruence. On the other hand, bosses who criticize the work of others with emails like “pls read agin, saw lots of typo and need sharpen point” might pause to consider all the messages they’re sending.. Yes, they communicate the gist through fast feedback. Their bad grammar, on the other, hand is a little poem about who can be arrested by the grammar police, and who can afford to pay off the grammar Supreme Court and fly off to a non-extradition grammar tropical paradise.