When handing out my annual guff awards last week I wrote something I’d now like to retract. I said clear language in business was perfectly possible if you tried hard enough.
I now find it’s not as simple as that. Last autumn, I co-founded a social enterprise designed to get people like me to retrain as teachers. Teach Last, I wanted to call it, which I thought both clear and comic. No, no, no, was the response from practically everyone. Teach Last, they insisted, sounded as if the crematorium was the next stop, and so I backed down, and settled on the least worst alternative, Now Teach.
Two words into the new project I’d learnt my first lesson. As a journalist I write whatever I like and if I upset someone, well, that’s part of the job. But when you are setting something up compromise has to be part of it — and compromise hardly ever goes with sharp language. It doesn’t matter if the words look pretty. If they alienate anyone, you have to fudge them.