T-Shirt or Stuffed-Shirt Writing?

By Dianna Booher

Some people write with a warm, personal, flowing style while others have a formal, impersonal, stilted way with words. The trend in today's e-commerce falls between the two extremes: "stuffed shirt" and T-shirt writing. Like our work clothes today, the preferred writing style has become business casual. And just as the business casual dress code has some people stumped, so has the business causal writing style.

Stuffed-shirt writing may be difficult to define, but it’s easy to recognize. Those who write in a stuffy style bury their ideas in passive verbs. They select weak sentence beginnings and bury key actions. They add unnecessary qualifiers and intensifiers to vague abstractions. Finally, they drape their ideas in trite, verbose statements.

On the other extreme are writers who send e-mail that could pass for a T-shirt slogan. They use aggressive words and no tact. They make up words when they can’t think of the correct ones. They ramble on and on, without sorting the main ideas and details from the irrelevant. They misspell, omit punctuation, and write incomplete thoughts, leaving clarity as the reader’s problem.

Stuffed-Shirt

It can easily be seen that when large volumes of gas are metered and when variations in the gas temperatures become commonplace, the resulting circumstance will be a loss of revenue if corrective action is not taken.

T-Shirt

Large volumes of METERED gas--big problem--in about two months we’re gonna lose our shirt unless somebody gets off their duff and okays something.

Simple, Direct

As we meter large volumes of gas, variations in gas temperature will result in lost revenues unless we take corrective action.

Leave T-shirt messages for the shopping mall.

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Dianna Booher works with organizations to increase their productivity and effectiveness through better oral, written, interpersonal, and cross-functional communication.She is a keynote speaker and the author of more than 40 books (22 on communication) including The Voice of Authority, Booher's Rules of Business Grammar, Speak with Confidence, and Communicate with Confidence. Dianna is CEO of Booher Consultants, a communication training firm offering programs in presentations skills, business writing, and interpersonal communication. Successful Meetings Magazine named her to its list of “21 Top Speakers for the 21st Century.” Executive Excellence Publishing also named Dianna to its “Top 100 Thought Leaders” and “Top 100 Minds on Personal Development.” www.booher.com or call 800.342.6621.

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