Rewriting Jack Dorsey’s ‘Jargon-Free’ Firing Memo

Gideon Lichfield, writing for Quartz, disagrees that Dorsey’s memo announcing layoffs is “jargon-free”, and offers his own revision:

For its genre, Dorsey’s memo is indeed admirably brief and to the point. But it’s still riddled with jargon. Why is it so hard for executives to write in a truly straightforward manner? Here is Dorsey’s memo, with our suggested cuts in strikethrough and additions in bold.

A few of these were a little euphemistic, but in the annals of translating from corporate-talk to plain English, this is pretty tame. Dorsey’s opening sentence is a clunker — “We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow” — but after that, I think it’s pretty clear.

★ Tuesday, 13 October 2015