It’s Frankenspeak Friday! (Are You Scared Yet?)

Today is Frankenstein Friday — an event that celebrates the birth of the famous freak. We’re co-opting the holiday to celebrate our favorite kind of related monster, Frankenspeak.

Frankenspeak is convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was spoken by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a laboratory. Sometimes it reads like someone bolted-on words to create a terrifying string of nonsense (“our mission-critical, scalable, high-performance, unparalleled, game-changing solution”) or bloated bit of buzzwords. Either way, it’s sales-y language and useless marketing hype.

C.C. and I wrote about the words and phrases that we’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms in the book. But since today is a day to celebrate the scary, here’s to Frankenspeak!

Source: diablo 2 items for sale

Happy Frankenspeak Friday!

4 Responses to “It’s Frankenspeak Friday! (Are You Scared Yet?)”

  1. Stan Dubin Says:

    In a word: fantabulizing!

  2. monique cuvelier Says:

    This one gives me hives: “Think outside the box.”

  3. 10 Horrid Words You Must Never Use (Plus, Win a Copy of Content Rules) | Talance Blog Says:

    […] to Ann Hadley and C.C. Chapman, authors of the book Content Rules. The term is described on the Content Rules book website as “convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was spoken by a human, but instead sounds […]

  4. Accessible Content Creation Playbook Gets It Right | Says:

    […] Put simply, the title is as dense as the book’s content (there’s that word again!) The authors write in a lively, accessible style that holds a mirror to one of the book’s central themes: write content that doesn’t sound like corporate-speak (as they call it ‘Frankenspeak’). […]