I’ve called it A Few Kind Words because that’s the title of a talk I gave recently to a group of HR directors. Paradoxically, it’s HR people who are often the unkindest of all in the way they use language at work. Even the description, Human Resources – to reheat an old chestnut – seems to me a kind of relegation. It puts people on a par with the paperclips. In fact it precisely dehumanises them. And it’s the dehumanisation of people through language that I try and counter at every turn.
I do so by reminding people that the word kindness originally meant being kin, or kindred, or of the same kind. We are all humankind and we forget it at our peril when we communicate. So we must remember to be kinder to one another. We must remember that when we write something, the person who reads it will be another human being probably much like us. And if we use language that fails to make a human connection, that reduces people and ideas to abstractions, we might as well not have bothered. Language like that is worse than useless, yet the world of work is full of it.
I want this blog to be an antidote to the dead language of business. I want it to be about the colour and rhythm, the emotion and humour that we use quite naturally when we speak to one another. And I want it to be about all the marvellous possibilities that lively, engaging language could bring to our writing lives if only we’d let it. I hope you’ll join me on the journey …
hello you – how lovely. and how needed. I am proud to be the frist to reply to your blog. I have a wee blog – mostly exclamations on the beautiful nature I have right here. Yes – how true – so often business uses war type language. Let's here it for human kindness
When you look around the web (YouTube in particular) at the vile and vituperous responses to differences of opinion, it's easy to get despondent about the state of human affairs. If, through your blog, you can encourage kinder and plainer language from business, you may contribute a building block to the regeneration of manners in society. Power to you.
A breath of fresh air wafting from the cluttered computer screen that is now, for better or worse, my workplace. Language should lift us and light our way. How often it seems aimed to drag us down into the gloom.So thank you for sharing your Kind Words, Jamie, and I look forward to reading more.