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As They Say, You CAN’T Make This Stuff Up

8/7/2006

1 Comment

 
Posted by BJ
From a mail sent to me by someone who attended the APMP conference in New Orleans. I think this might take first prize for ‘Most Unintelligible’* text.

Dear ‘Proposal Guys’,

I just returned from the Big EZ, where I hurt after laughing throughout your presentation!

Just ran across this in an Executive Summary – can you believe it? Makes me want to cry…​
​“We are firm believers in the opportunity that organizations have to leverage technology to help with the challenges that you have defined and has worked with many organizations to help them quickly operationalize systems that can deliver immediate benefits in optimizing customer management. In these engagements, we utilize [our] software to allow our clients to truly optimize their customer contact strategy designs across offers, customers, channels, and time. To execute these strategies, in both real-time and batch environments, we enable strategies that have been designed in our [software] to be deployed within our leading business rules decisioning engine.”
​The first sentence alone breaks just about every rule you could possible think of – multiple ideas, confusing wording, multiple tenses (amazingly, this text uses past, present AND future tenses – all in one sentence), run-on sentences (43 words), made up words (‘operationalize’???), repetitive words (optimize).

And can someone tell me what a ‘decisioning engine’ is????

Hey Jon. Perhaps we should have contest and solicit entries for this?
1 Comment
Janeen Bartholomew
3/26/2016 05:44:14 am

Agreed. I have posted on my wall (to remind me what NOT to write) another example from the IT industry:

“Instead of building universal, definitive taxonomies, information architects are finding there is a tremendous benefit to creating un-taxonomized miscellaneous pools of enriched data objects so that users can sort and organize to suit their own peculiar needs [resulting in] information systems that are far more contextualized.”

Or, as we writers at the meeting said, “HUH?”
Even better, as E.B. White said,
“When you have said something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”
Good to remember….

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