Copywriting · 7 September 2026
Say the thing. Then stop.
Corporate language went ornamental somewhere around 2010. Readers stopped forgiving it.
Adapted from a longer piece in the archive.
Somewhere in the last fifteen years, corporate writing acquired a dialect. Solutions were leveraged. Journeys were embarked upon. Nothing was ever simply done.
Readers have stopped forgiving it. Plain, direct language now reads as confidence, and the ornamental version reads as something being avoided — which, often enough, it is. If a sentence takes forty words to say a thing that needs twelve, a reader assumes the other twenty-eight are doing defensive work.
This is not an argument for writing badly, or for stripping every sentence to its bones. It is an argument for making the reader's job easy and being willing to be understood. The test is simple: read it aloud. If you would not say it to the person in front of you, do not print it.
The brands that get this right are not the ones with the biggest vocabularies. They are the ones willing to be plain about difficult things.