this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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I have a visceral reaction to words like elucidate, and other fluff. My writing has to be very to the point, and technically accurate. Because of this, I carve up drafts from juniors like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Most "professional" writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.
I'm involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it's 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.
It doesn't have to be like that. Sure, context is important, but parroting phrases or other crap that the client has in the RFP is bullshit. They don't want you blowing smoke up their ass, they want a technically sound product that addresses the exact issues they asked you to address. They also want you to show them how you're going to get there, and achieve the objectives they set out.
I realize you're on the tech side; I'm just venting my frustrations with the corporate/PM spheres.
I thankfully don't have to deal with RFPs anymore, but when I did, I'd either go line-by-line or ignore the prospect's text entirely. There is an in-between, but it's wishy-washy crowd-pleasing nonsense, and even the people entrenched in those bureaucracies see straight through it.
That, and parroting makes it sound like you don't know what they want, or that you're stupid, and the best that you could come up with is their own text with slight variation
Well, actually you're kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.
So I'm not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) "we will deploy that in our k8s cluster" but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that's incredibly stupid.
Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.
I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.
I work in IT, and by now, every single 3-letter-abbreviation makes my eyelid twitch.
My industry is three-letter-acronym (TLA) heavy
They let the ad guys write grants and then wonder why they don't end up getting them
Doing the Lord's work. The longer I work in academia, the more radical I become about keeping it simple.
It's heartening to see comments like this. Busybody buzzwords and marketing maneuvering infiltrating real scientific study has been a hallmark of the de-intellectualisation of society for a long time, in my mind.
Your writing could use a little polishing.