The virtues of writing like a human being

As an organization, all employees have demonstrated success in every facet of our strategic vision, settling for nothing less than the highest standard of operational quality, and for that reason, you deserve to be praised for your continued focus on improvement.

That’s a typical corporate-speak memo. It’s not bad. It’s grammatically correct and sticks to a clear message.

If you manage internal communications for a company, and you’re tasked with crafting a congratulatory note to employees, this is probably close to what you’d write. I know it’s what I’d write—because I did.

That’s from an article I wrote last year for our internal newsletter. It checked all the boxes, and it got management approval. The problem is that it’s boring.

What’s wrong with boring? Official company messages aren’t required to be anything more than factual. However, boring messages are easily ignored. The onus is on communicators to bridge the divide between how we communicate “officially” and how we communicate “naturally.”

How we communicate outside of work