Why communicators should not speak German

In your writing, any cluster of run-on adjectives and nouns totaling three (or more) likely means you’re talking like a vice president or a CEO, and you’re jabbering in a foreign tongue: German

In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a famous essay titled, The Awful German Language. He parodied a peculiarity of German writers: They pile up nouns and adjectives one after the other in ridiculously long phrases unrelieved by verbs, prepositions, or commas.

Twain named this bad habit “the compounding disease.” The only punctuation marks in these long strings were the lowly hyphen and its first cousin, the parentheses. Well, we Americans have gone the Germans one better: We’ve eliminated the parentheses, and we use hyphens when our inner writer’s light tells us we should, which is to say, very inconsistently.

Leave it to corporate America to let them off the hook. We have out-Germaned the Germans.

Take our corporate practice of using nouns and adjectives in groups of three.

Repeatedly stringing three nouns and adjectives together sets up a singsong rhythm in waltz time that very shortly bores your reader and, finally, maddens her.