By Andrew Syrios
Back in business school, I was subjected to several long lectures on the dreaded evils of fluff. Boil down your corporate memos to the raw essentials. Get rid of all those filler words and colloquial phrases. Write as if an automaton was generating TPS reports that were intended to put to sleep even those suffering from the worst forms of insomnia.
Don’t get me wrong, the “war on fluff” gets some things right. For example, this article “How to Remove Unnecessary Filler and Fluff From Your Writing” has some generally helpful recommendations like “avoid redundancy” and “nix common knowledge.” Those kinds of things are usually unnecessary in business writing. But overall, while a substantial amount of fluff may be extraneous, it is still absolutely necessary.
The reason fluff can be necessary is that nonverbal communication lacks an enormous amount of nuance. Psychologists have argued that most communication is nonverbal (possibly as much as 93%). Yet emails, memos, and letters contain only words. Body language is left out and tone is relegated to the inadequate tool of punctuation. In written communication, jokes can become insults, irony can become prejudice, sarcasm can become matter-of-fact statements, and miscommunication can become the norm.
I’ve seen this play out in my professional life multiple times. Recently, one staff member sent another an odd, but rather innocuous joke that came off as a sarcastic put down. All of a sudden, a rift formed between key employees that took a substantial amount of time and energy to unwind.
When extraneous words are important
Explaining oneself clearly, especially in written communication, can often require extraneous words—i.e., fluff. The great Dale Carnegie noted in his classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People just how important these little fluff phrases are:
If, for example, the waitress brings us mashed potatoes when we have ordered French fried, let’s say: ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I prefer French fried.’ She’ll probably reply, ‘No trouble at all’ and will be glad to change the potatoes, because we have shown respect for her.
Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to—?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’—little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life.”
It is nowhere written that such “little courtesies” are not allowed in business communication.
In his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Malcolm Goldsmith further points out that “killing the messenger” is one of the biggest mistakes successful people make. Killing the messenger doesn’t just involve attacking the person who told you some bad news—it can involve getting angry about that news in front of the person who told it to you. For the messenger, this feels like a personal attack, even if the anger is directed only at the problem.
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In written communication, this type of anger or disappointment can come through even more easily and often unintentionally. For example, you may intend to say the company missed its projected revenue because the economy went into a recession by writing, “We missed our projected revenue goals this quarter by 13%.” However, that could very easily come off as telling your employees you think they’re terrible. Just a little change, even one that includes “common knowledge” such as “Because of the recent recession, we missed our projected revenue goals this quarter by 13%” will nip that potential problem right in the bud.