Death Sentence gives life to writers

Don Watson’s Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language is essential for anyone who writes, and especially for business and professional writers.

Watson argues that public language is decaying because of ‘death sentences’ like this one:

“Our procedures in respect of the audit of the concise financial report included testing that the information in the concise financial report is consistent with the full financial report…” (page 125)

From the Prime Minister to the phone company, language is being infected by meaningless phrases which Watson says are draining imagination and life from communication.

This, says Watson, is killing how people relate, play footy and do business, because this dead language obscures truth.

It’s a bit of a rant, but Death Sentence struck a chord with us at Alucida not only because we’ve seen some great examples of dead language in our line of work, but because we’ve seen how it erodes effective communication within organisations. It helped us think more critically about how we communicate and how to do it better—which is always a good thing.