Ah, jargon. The business writer’s bane.
(And, let’s be honest here, very occasionally the business writer’s savior. It’s late. You’re on deadline. You need to shoehorn a 50-word description into a 30-word elevator pitch. It happens. But we aspire to better things.)
If you’ve ever struggled with the lure of business/marcom/tech jargon—or laughed at its most egregious examples—have I got a site for you. Unsuckit.com, from the brave, paradigm-shifting souls at Mule Design, does exactly what its name promises: take the buzzwords of the day and translate them into clear, unhyped standard English:
Actionable
Unsucked: Specific, doable, or achievable.
Knowledge acquisition
Unsucked: Way of learning.
Liaise
Unsucked: Talk. Meet. Make arrangements.
Price point
Unsucked: Price.
Some of the worst offenders also get what’s coming to them:
Paradigm
This new paradigm cuts through techno-jargon and targets the common sense marketing-driven requirements for creating a website designed to grow a business.
Unsucked: Trumped-up concept recently coined as a substitute for actual innovation.
Disruptive
The process will undergo major transformation thanks to the introduction of a potentially disruptive option.
Unsucked: Exhibiting the potential to shake things up. Despised in toddlers, feared in competitors, and projected upon one’s own lame entrepreneurial fantasies.
And then there are the blog posts, an (occasionally profane) breath of fresh air. For online edutainment, you could do far worse than this authentic, out-of-the-box exercise in crowdsourcing. Who knows? It might even transform your writing.
