Academic language vs. corporate language

you picked a way cooler academic language example, not a fair fight at all

voted corporate obviously

lol @ corporate language

wait, what are the criteria?

Criteria: It is essential that, to qualify as Best Practices, the activities in question be evaluated in terms of the criteria of innovation, success and sustainability by both experts and the people concerned. To function as a model for replication, however, it is imperative that information about the activities be easily accessible.

Everyone's been using "spend" as a noun at my office lately. Being one of these people is apparently the only way to get ahead now, because no one can possibly remember that there is a word like "expenditure."

I mean granted it has several extra syllables, kill it, kill all the big words.

are we voting the one we like or the one that makes us barf the hardest?

"I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit."

Using "spend" as a noun sounds like something dreamt up by marketers. It makes expenditures seem more casual.

That academic quote has quite a bit of bad grammer.

"be able to, and in a single gesture, to...
FFS go back to English Comp. 101!

Also that's a stupid definition of machine. Voted corporate (with my nose plugged).

corporate language is obviously funnier. academic-speak quit being funny for me after the tenth time i'd encountered it, but corporate-speak's ability to just generate one basically meaningless phrase after another is something for the ages.

the funniest thing is that corporate speak actually is meaningful if you have like an MBA, but they use all these weird technocratic phrases and terms say shit like: "lets have all the departments share the network so we don't have to waste money on maintaining separate subnets. Also then we only need one IT manager - BOOM goes the dynamite."

or rather, "-- and this will allow us to expand into the detonation phase of the development process cycle."

also corporate language wins just 'cause:

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/5557/84445610.jpg

still one of my favorite things ever

"Using "spend" as a noun sounds like something dreamt up by marketers. It makes expenditures seem more casual."

Pretty much. I've been hearing "what's our print spend this quarter? Do we need to move some of that to online?" at work for like a decade.

Two of my colleagues andy recently made up bingo cards to use when we are on conference calls together, containing words/phrases like "robust," "bandwidth," "close the loop," "take this offline," etc. We can't use them ourselves to complete a row, but guiding people in that direction is OK.

"Bandwidth" used in reference to anything but actual Internet capacity or electromagnetic waves makes me irrationally angry.

the funniest thing is that corporateacademic speak actually is meaningful if you have like an MBAa PhD

corporate speak is funnier esp as i don't have to encounter it in the workplace

"to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time"

this is a hilariously bad pile-up of clauses though

i don't think translation helps

i have a vague idea of what the corporate example means, none at all what the academic example means

like if i recognise it then the first example is a translation of a French text, which creates problems of its own. the second example is authentic first hand corporatese

is it bad that I find the corporate example immediately understandable and unremarkable?

The corporate one is not that bad by corporate standards

I've never really known whether corporate speak creates a closed world that makes it harder for outsiders to break in or whether it almost levels the playing field between those of different educational and cultural backgrounds by rendering everything that is said completely unremarkable.

i'd say the latter - the impression i've got is that corporate language is basically space-filler; you don't need to understand or parse it because it's usually text that doesn't need to exist in the first place, and the actual business is going on elsewhere

One argument in defence of academese is that its complexity reflects that of the issues the author is trying to tease out (as discussed in the feminism thread). That doesn't hold for corporate speak (I hope) - if the speaker has trouble wrestling with the concepts in his/her business plan it can't be a very sensible plan.

Everyone's been using "spend" as a noun at my office lately. Being one of these people is apparently the only way to get ahead now, because no one can possibly remember that there is a word like "expenditure."

― one little aioli (Laurel), Thursday, 16 February 2012 05:02 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just ran a find and replace through my presentation for this. there were two.

kill me.

"spend" is much easier to type and say than "expenditure", I've no problem with it.

academic. it's at least kind of fun to wrestle with. corp-speak is just numbing.

Corporate speak is grease for the workings of the corporate machine. Language deliberately kept neutral in order to reduce as much as possible the friction you'd otherwise get when people are doing things they don't want to do for people they don't like.

and if you deal with it every day, it just becomes part of the familiar office environment along with swivel chairs, windows that don't open and sharepoint.

incentivize

synergize

strategize

Let's write a Rush song!

The horrifying grammar in the academic example is like Exhibit A of why I despise academic speak

Although I'm slightly terrified that the business speak example doesn't phase me at all

langauge designed to convey intellectual rigor and subtlety of thinking vs. language designed to convey conventions of power and subtleties of knowledge w/r/t hierarchies IOW both are awful

I was trying to find a better corporate language example but the one I found was on the Obama CIO webpage; I don't know really know how to trawl the net to find a more perfect "we will synergize our best practices using a diverse, team-driven approach". When I was in the corporate world I ran into that sort of thing occasionally, & in academia you get it also from administration, but thankfully life goes on if you ignore it: you do your job & let the managers describe it in their way; the act doesn't need to be described that way for business to continue...whereas academic writing à la Derrida can't be ignored if you care about the issue you think is in question.

"we will synergize our best practices using a diverse, team-driven approach"

the best thing about this sentence is that it looks meaningless but it isn't

I don't know really know how to trawl the net to find a more perfect "we will synergize our best practices using a diverse, team-driven approach"

1. Go to any IT or software-as-a-service company's webpage.
2. Find their mission statement.
3. Profit!

I have been having to do a ton of academic reading again recently, and it has made me want to claw my eyeballs out. Otoh, if I had to read a bunch of wanky Six Sigma management books I'd probably be in the same boat.

well the good thing about corporate speak is that you don't have to worry about there being any meaning that you're missing

In corporate speak, apparently "sunset" is now a verb. From a recent presentation:

"Is that edition still in print?"
"No, we've sunsetted that."

Sunsat it?

"sunset" has been a verb for at least 10 years, if not 15!

Good Christ in Christendom.

I've never heard that in my LYFE.

I'd never heard sunset as a verb either, until last month. I was so enraged, I wanted to graveyard the presenter.

What does it mean?

It means something has ended.

It has a poetic quality

The worst is when business jargon insinuates itself in academic settings. My university's new motto: "results-oriented student excellence."

okay that is embarrassing

because, see, you can tabulate "results."

Sunset also v euphemistic - "our customer service division was at home in bed surrounded by its grandchildren, and in no sense would being dragged into the fields and forced to dig its own grave be a better metaphor"

Has anyone pointed out yet that not all academics are the same and different people like different writers (not to mention different schools of thought, critical discourses, etc) and Judith Butler is divisive even today, particularly bc of her writing style. It's not like everyone in that field is gaga over her and can't understand why ppl outside academia can't understand her. I had a prof in grad school openly suggest in class that Butler was an intellectual failure because her ideas are too densely constructed to gain traction in the wider population. Some ppl obviously love her, but some ppl (like me) would rather read, idk, eve kosofsky sedgwick instead of yet another butler book, even while acknowledging how important butler is (and often that importance comes thru the ppl she has influenced, and the ways she has been read + interpreted, much more than it has come thru her)

A tingling of excitement raced through her as his fingers trailed sensuously down her arm.

Everbody who read her started a band?

xpost

No, but some ppl who read her taught her in the course materials.

Since we've evoked Watterson

http://madshakespeare.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/calvin-and-hobbes.jpg

totally going to use that cartoon on an exam
tyvm

When offered a choice of poisons, I prefer to decline to choose.

Srsly... you guys haven't heard of things like "sunset clauses" in contracts and laws and stuff?

Stop trying to problematize every verbed noun!

When offered a choice of poisons, I prefer to decline to choose.
― Cosy Moments (Aimless)

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

xp - maybe they should just call it a 'spense?

http://www.purpose.com/about-purpose/what-we-do/

can't make out what the fuck this company actually do

*does

Looks like they optimize third-sector outreach opportunities utilizing innovative movement branding.

That website's an absolute gem, right down to the 'quirky' team profile pics.

Essentially, and i may be oversimplifying, i think that if you want to cure restless leg syndrome or overthrow the government of Kazakhstan, you go to them and they tell you which hashtags you should be using.

nice work if you can get it

their director of user experience is a dog

Corporate, because I'm fluent.

But wait wait guys what about art language

HAHA i think there's an "artist's statement" thread around here somewhere...

My body of work attempts to recontextualize a feministic viewpoint from within a post-patriarchal diegesis &c &c

I went to Sparkcon in Raleigh last year and there was this one program someone made where it randomly generated artist statements and it was the best thing ever

but art crit. isn't much different from lit. crit. to my untrained eyes.

both of these suck obv

The horrifying grammar in the academic example is like Exhibit A of why I despise academic speak

Although I'm slightly terrified that the business speak example doesn't phase me at all

― (thinks and smiles) (DJP), Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:30 AM (3 days ago)

;)

I've found myself well entrenched in both the academic and corporate worlds at various times and I would absolutely pick academic language over corporate language. When academic language is well written and deployed it can expand our understanding of the world around us. Corporate language always obscures and obfuscates rather than creating more clarity.

I am endlessly frustrated by the difficulty my co-workers and managers have with saying things clearly and plainly when it would make life so much easier to do so. They use a lot of corporate jargon and euphemisms as a way to avoid stating simple truths that they are not comfortable with and end up leaving everyone more confused.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I'm trying to watch "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her"and I forgot how much Godard is basically academic speak translated into cinema. God, this movie is so tedious.

yeah, that is maybe my least favorite

At work I am stuck in a permanent hell between the language of teaching (straightforward, unambiguous, unadorned with social niceties but generally positive) and an antiquated 20th c version of the language of business (please do go ahead and let me know, if you wouldn't mind taking a moment to send, tons of sociolinguistic padding, etc) and it is driving me crazy.

Neither of these are particularly academic, but they are very different from each other and it's such a drag to have to sift through emails that are like one line of relevant information surrounded by 4 sentences of totally unnecessary bs.

All that padding is to ensure that you don't hurt yourself on some sharp edge that hasn't been properly blunted down. Back in the day, things moved much more slowly and there was time to unwrap all those layers.

i know what it's for, i just don't like it

As a workplace irritant, I'd just be glad it isn't pesticide residue or jet engine noise.

Yeah I know -- but it is interfering with things running smoothly and, as I mentioned, is driving me bananas. I guess I should be happy I don't work in a missile silo!