Right before I started on the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal as a young pup, a veteran at the Washington Post wrote a column in which he joked that his job was "to change 'that' to 'which' and 'which' to 'that' every time they appear in copy." I soon learned that that's pretty much how reporters view copy editors, and I've always tried not to be pedantic.
But little things add up, and as we all try to innovate and drive progress in our crucial industry, I think we'd benefit by being more precise with our language. I griped last summer about how seemingly every company claims to be transforming itself and disrupting the industry. Here, I'll lament a smaller point: that so many issues are treated as white-knucklers or otherwise hyped through modifiers that are somewhere between redundant and meaningless.
Today, for instance, I received an article that said the industry was at a "critical moment of truth." "Moment of truth" wasn't strong enough. We're at a "critical" moment of truth, as though there's some other kind.
Our messages about the importance of what's happening in insurance will be stronger if we come across as less breathless and more careful.
Here is some of the most common offending language to watch for.
Joseph Heller mocked the word "major" with his character Major Major Major Major in "Catch-22," but it's everywhere in business writing. We don't have a disaster, we have a "major" disaster. We don't have a catastrophe, we have a "major" catastrophe. Every crisis is "major," as is every milestone. Is there even such a thing as a minor disaster, a minor catastrophe, a minor crisis or a minor milestone?
In Ecclesiastes, the wise King Solomon writes that there is nothing new under the sun. But in business writing, including in insurance, seemingly everything is new under the sun.
We set "new" records, create "new" products and generate "new" insights, as though it's possible to set an old record or create an old product, or as though anyone would want to generate an old insight. We even brag about "new" innovations, somehow not noting that the word "innovation" literally means new. (The root, novus, is Latin for new.)
"Proactively" is another one that can almost always go. It works fine if you're talking about being proactive rather than reactive, but it is sprinkled into writing like fairy dust, without any of the magic.
It gets misused in two ways. One, it's used redundantly. Someone will write about "proactively" warning someone or "proactively" preventing a loss -- but warnings, actions that prevent loss, etc., have to be done ahead of time. You can't reactively warn someone or prevent a loss that's happened. Two, "proactively" gets tossed in as emphasis, A company doesn't just send a communication to policyholders; it "proactively" sends that communication.
(My theory is that "proactively" came about through a sort of language creep. People want to underscore what they're doing, so they don't just, say, search; they "actively" search. But "actively" wasn't enough for some, so they threw a prefix onto it to tell readers that they're actively, actively taking some action.)
Speaking of meaningless emphasis, why have people started writing about doing things with "intentionality"? All that says is that you did something on purpose -- and I hope you aren't doing things by accident. For good measure, "intentionality" is a bastardized word. The root noun is "intent." Turning that into an adjective gives us "intentional." But there's no reason to add a suffix to "intentional" to come up with a new noun form. "Intent" works just great.
There are plenty of others: the "proven" track record, even though the whole point of a track record is that it can be inspected; all the "successful" launches and ventures, even though no one would write about them if they hadn't succeeded; and so on.
To zoom out, away from what may feel like pedantry, I'm arguing for less redundancy and, in the process, less hype. Not everything is "major" or "new" or "proactive" or whatever. There's plenty of important stuff going on in insurance, and we'll come across as more authoritative if we write about it more sparely and accurately.
Cheers,
Paul