Josh Bernoff - Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean

To Dad, who taught me to be bold, clear, and honest

If you follow the advice you are about to read, it will have a powerful impact on your career.

Learning to say what you mean in a bold, direct way can boost your career. Saying it the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or to the wrong person, can also get you in trouble.

While I hope these words will help you, you alone are responsible for the consequences, positive or negative, of writing without bullshit.

Contents

The tide of bullshit is rising.

Your email inbox is full of irrelevant, poorly written crap. Your boss talks in jargon and clichs. The websites you read are impenetrable and incomprehensible.

Bullshit is a burden on all of us, keeping us from getting useful work done.

Technology has made it breathtakingly easy for anybody to create content and distribute it to thousands of people. Unfortunately, nobody told those creators what it takes to create good content, so were stuck wading through a deluge of drivel.

You know this is a problem. Im here to tell you that its also an opportunity.

Imagine for a moment that you could write boldly, clearly, and powerfully every time you sat down at the keyboard. When your email showed up in your colleagues inboxes, it would pop. Reports you wrote would get people to sit up and take notice. Customers would respond to your marketing copy. Youd earn a reputation as a straight talker.

Why arent you doing this yet? I know why. Ive worked with thousands of people just like you, people who work in offices and need to communicate in their jobs. Heres whats stopping themand youfrom clearing away the bullshit and writing clearly.

First, you got the wrong training. In high school and college, you learned to write verbose prose to fool teachers into believing you knew what you were talking about. Those teachers implicitly taught you that bullshitting was effective.

Then, when you started working, you found yourself immersed in more babble. From the moment you sat down and read the employee manual, you were sunk. You took your cues from the people around you, people who didnt tend to tell the plain truth when they wrote things.

Finally, you learned that avoiding risk was paramount. Clarity can be dangerous because people who read what you wrote might disagree with it.

If youre okay with being a mindless component in the vast bullshit machine that is the business world, please put this book down and walk away. You can keep writing equivocal garbage, and youll fit in just fine.

But if youd prefer to stand out, I can show you how. Its not that hard. In fact, its mostly a matter of connecting with your own natural ways of communicating.

Ill show you whats motivating you to write the way you do and whats stopping you from writing more clearly. Every single bad habit youve learned is tied up with your own psychology at work. As I teach you to express yourself more powerfully, Ill clear away the motivational roadblocks that are stopping you. Once you understand that psychology, youll be on your way to making a far more powerful impression.

I will give you the courage to say what you mean.

Then Ill give you the skills, teach you the tricks, and show you how to organize your day so you get the chance to show that courage in everything you write.

If you have good ideas and express them well in writing, youll get credit for those ideas and their clarity. Youll also get credit for your candor and integrity. Not only is that good for your career, but it feels good, too.

The Iron Imperative

Lets agree on one principle. This principle powers everything else in this book. I call it the Iron Imperative:

Treat the readers time as more valuable than your own.

That couldnt be simpler. And yet everything thats wrong with the way businesspeople write today stems from ignoring this principle.

A marketer creates a website to describe her company. Shes on a deadline and has to get input from multiple people. Eventually she gives up and cobbles together some prose that has everybodys fingerprints on it. Is her top priority the readers time? No, its getting the text into the site by the deadline.

A coworker emails you and a dozen others about a problem in your department. He puts down the elements in the order that they occur to him. The subject line is I was just thinking. Hes been very efficient with his own time. Is he respecting your time, too? Nope.

An analyst assembles a report to justify the actions that a city should take. He knows there will be lots of objections, and he doesnt want to sound stupid, so he includes as many justifications as possible and couches everything in passive language that hides whos responsible for any actions he recommends. He has covered his ass in a very sophisticated way. Has he considered the readers time? Not a chance.

These people arent inherently selfish. Theyre just busy. When youre busy, you worry more about yourself and your deadlines. You create text to fill spaces and do jobs. It turns out that its not so easy to just write clear, bold prose every time. So you do the best you can.

Unfortunately, each small step toward expediency erodes your own sense of integrity. You are no longer saying what you mean. That takes a moral toll on you even as it wastes your readers time.

This waste is even worse than it appears because were all reading nearly all the time now. Were continually consuming massive amounts of this indifferent prose, and were doing so on glass screens that dont make reading easy. Were surrounded by distractions.

Thats why the world seems to be so full of bullshitbecause were drowning in text that was slapped together without a focus on meaning and directness.

The Iron Imperative sounds like a good idea. But even if you accept it, how can you actually put it into practice?

Measuring Meaning

When you read something that is meaningful, you learn something. You could learn what Elon Musk thinks about artificial intelligence, how much rain is going to fall in the next 24 hours, or what database strategy makes sense for your company. Meaning makes you smarter.

When I talk about bullshit, I have something very specific in mind. Its prose that makes you go, Huh? Bullshit is communication that wastes the readers time by failing to communicate clearly and accurately. While that includes outright lies, lies are not the biggest problem in business communication. The biggest problem is lack of clarity. Jargon, overuse of qualifying words like very and deeply, confusing passive sentences, poorly organized thinking, and just general rambling on: thats bullshit. Those are constructions that hide meaning rather than reveal it.

Because of this definition, I can actually measure bullshit. To do this, I take any passage of text and identify the words that have no real meaning. Lets take a look at an example.

Inovalon is a healthcare technology company based in Maryland. On its website, under Who We Are, is this description:

Inovalon is a leading technology company that combines advanced cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms to achieve meaningful insight and impact in clinical and quality outcomes, utilization, and financial performance across the healthcare landscape. Inovalons unique achievement of value is delivered through the effective progression of Turning Data into Insight, and Insight into Action. Large proprietary datasets, advanced integration technologies, sophisticated predictive analytics, data-driven intervention platforms, and deep subject matter expertise deliver a seamless, end-to-end capability that brings the benefits of big data and large-scale analytics to the point of care.