Language, messages and internal communication

There’s a very interesting post and discussion on the Black Belt Dojo blog about how language and grammar have been changing. I’ve put up a rather long, quite general comment there, but it struck me that there might be some interesting implications for internal communication, which I thought I’d try and distil.

(i) Language is generational
In every generation, there are keepers of language and there are the (young) upstarts who challenge the rules. The keepers fight their corner, saying the young are disrespectfully violating a heritage of great language. The young abbreviate, split infinitives, use slang, swear, and so on… The keepers reject the new grammar, vocabulary and punctuation as ‘uneducated’, ‘crass’, etc, but finally a critical mass is reached and they realise that their rules are no longer appropriate and are redundant. They have to give in because the weight of society and new usage are too great to ignore and they very grudgingly change their dictionaries to accommodate the new words and grammar.

I imagine that if you’re reading this, you’re most likely in your 30s, 40s or 50s (and possibly in your 20s or 60s). I’m in my later 30s. We’re all professional people – serious at work, sure, but we’re also real people. We go to movies, we listen to music, we’re out and about in the real world, the now-world and not the world of yesteryear where things were more regulated, where language was more pedantic. We’ve grown up with pop culture, more liberal times.

Society has evolved over generations. Values have evolved. Grammar has evolved. Our peers are now the keepers of language and we split infinitives, contract words, mess about with grammar.

(ii) Language is cultural
We live in a multicultural society. We have access to a whole slew of media channels that our parents never had – digital TV, internet, etc. These aren’t controlled by keepers of language with received pronunciation (as was the case two decades ago) – they’re run by people of different ages, from different parts of the UK, the US and, increasingly, the world – and many of these (eg user-generated) are hardly regulated at all.

(iii) But there are still conventions – language is context-specific
These are liberated and multicultural times, but there are still conventions. However changed the media are relative to what they were in the 60s, 70s and even 80s, they do still observe conventions. The Times, The Sun, Big Brother, even videos on YouTube observe conventions. Different ones, perhaps quite subjective ones (where people dip in and out of societal and sub-societal rules of language), but conventions nevertheless.

But one context where the rules of grammar are still particularly strict (and less affected by changes in society) is in business. A business plan isn’t an email to a friend. There are levels of expectation that people have in business, and not observing the rules can raise eyebrows or even draw criticism. If I say in a business plan, "This new thing we’ve got is sort of like the thing I saw on TV the other day, but it’s much wickeder." This is not only the case with a formal document like a business plan – it can apply equally to a client email, even if I’ve known the client for some time. We’re both in our 30s or 40s, wouldn’t dream of using that formal language and grammar outside of work, but we do so at work because that’s the convention.

Some possible preliminary implications for internal communication:

1. The vocabulary and grammar a person uses in their personal lives are not the same as those they use in their work lives.

Work can be fun, but it’s not play. The content is different, likely to be much drier more regularly. Employees may want/need communications that are straightforward and down-to-earth to understand, but they’re likely to expect communications that are written with an appropriate grammar, otherwise there’s a strong danger that they could see those communications as out of place.

No doubt, society is going to continue to become ever more liberal, and use of grammar ever looser in non-work contexts. Those young people who are now starting to use mobile phone text language in their everyday lives (eg “bk l8 tmrw, dnt w8 up”), when they write email and notes to each other in their everyday lives, will be entering the workplace in less than five years time. But I suspect that they would find it totally inappropriate to receive communications about serious issues at work in mobile phone text language: “Where is my organisation going and what part do I play? Why is our CEO leaving? How many shifts have I got this week and when are they? What sales targets do I have to meet this month? What’s so great about working in this organisation?”

Employees expect a certain language from leadership, their managers and their organisation. And, if this is absent the message won’t be understood and may not be accepted at all.

2. In spite of the importance I’ve placed above on getting the language and grammar right, there’s a danger here.

It seems that internal communicators sometimes get caught up in debates about grammar – as they do in debates about delivery channels – and lose sight of the importance of getting the message right. When these communicators see there is an issue they need to communicate to employees, they look at the target audience and immediately jump to questions about how that audience expects/needs to receive the message and what style and language it expects/needs.

These communicators lose sight of the fact that it’s the ‘why and the what’ (ie the message) that are primary, not the how (ie language and delivery channel). Starting with a grammar and a delivery channel and then trying to work your way back to defining a message that fits these isn’t only difficult, it’s likely to result in inappropriate results. You may have just the right delivery channel and language for the audience, but if you don’t have the right message, then – quite simply – you don’t have the right message --- end of story.

Graeme

Graeme Ginsberg
Managing Editor, Research
Melcrum

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