Example 3: “Leverage the power of ever-increasing interconnected media channels by

inspecting them through a marketing lens. This integrative archetype affords businesses a

new context proven for retooling marketers to rethink clients working in a rewired

market.”

This trend toward what writer Erin Kissane calls “zombie copy” blossomed with the advent

of the Web, and hit critical mass around the time the first dot-com bubble burst in 2001.2

Traditional selling collateral rarely required such language because most sales efforts were

focused on consumers. But the economic tsunami of the technology sector brought a

massive influx of postmodern business-to-business marketing, and companies quickly

found themselves stumbling over superlatives, euphemisms, and run-on sentences. There’s

no obvious reason why this occurred, but it’s fair to say a combination of factors were at

work, including the following:

To make the product or service appear more complex than necessary

To make the company itself appear smarter than its customers and thus subcon-

sciously claim authority on the topic

To make their target audience feel smarter

To use the thesaurus more often

The trend, thankfully, seems to be waning. Many companies have scaled back the layers of

nonsensical verbiage, put their thesauruses back on the shelf, and started writing in plain

language again, like their forefathers in advertising taught them. The more your company

exercises this, the more effective and far-reaching its marketing material will be in the

market.

Have mercy on the thesaurus

The torrent of bad writing has left a graveyard of once-valid, now-cliché words in its wake.

In the California Gold Rush of 1848 and 1849, thousands of people tore through rock and

stream to find any speck of gold their prospecting neighbor up the stream left behind. In

the late 1990s, the American English Thesaurus became a similar victim of pillaging.

Suddenly, plain English wasn’t good enough. Use was replaced by utilize, company was

made obsolete by enterprise and the use of acronyms—the ultimate achievement in

euphemistic writing—was suddenly so fashionable you could invent them on the fly and

people would almost applaud. This swath of abuse sent dozens of useful but relatively

uncommon words crashing down into a pit of clichédom. Couple this with the invention of

new words (seriosity) and the trend of ridiculous modifiers (world-class), and we suddenly