My eyes are burning after staring at the 127th line of a spreadsheet that supposedly explains a ‘transformative framework for organizational excellence.’ The blue light is doing something to my retinas, but the prose is doing something much worse to my brain. I’ve been sitting here for 37 minutes, and I still can’t tell if the company is firing half its staff or just buying new office chairs. This is the hallmark of modern professional communication: a 17-page document that could have been a three-sentence text message, but wasn’t, because three sentences don’t provide enough places to hide. I once spent a whole afternoon comparing the prices of identical ceramic mugs on 7 different websites just to feel like something in the world was quantifiable and honest. The mugs were all exactly the same, yet each site described them with a different level of ‘artisanal synergy.’ It was exhausting.

“

Writing is a shield, not a bridge.

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Fortification by Jargon

We pretend that business writing is bad because people are lazy or busy. That is a lie. Bad business writing is a deliberate, though often unconscious, defense mechanism. If you use words like ‘leveraging,’ ‘actioning,’ and ‘stakeholder-centric paradigms,’ you aren’t communicating; you are building a fortification. If the project fails, no one can point to a specific sentence you wrote and say you were wrong, because no one actually knows what you said. You are safe. You are wrapped in a 47-layer cocoon of jargon that signals authority while saying absolutely nothing. It is the linguistic equivalent of a squid inking its way out of a confrontation. I know this because I’ve done it. I remember writing a report where I used the word ‘optimization’ 27 times because I didn’t actually have any data to show that the new system worked. I was terrified of being found out, so I buried my ignorance in a pile of multisyllabic garbage.

Natasha R.-M. understands this better than most, though she doesn’t work in an office. She’s a foley artist I met while she was trying to recreate the sound of a very specific type of briefcase being dropped on a marble floor. Her studio is filled with 77 pairs of shoes and 17 different types of gravel, all because she knows that a sound has to be precise to be true. If she records a generic ‘thud,’ the audience feels the falseness. But in the corporate world, the ‘thud’ is the goal. We want the sound of activity without the mess of reality. Natasha told me once, while she was vigorously shaking a sheet of 27-gauge metal to simulate thunder, that most people are terrified of silence. In business, that silence is the gap where an original idea should be. To fill that gap, we pour in liquid jargon until the silence is drowned out. It’s a performance. We are all foley artists of the boardroom, creating the sounds of progress while we’re really just hitting a pair of old boots against a piece of plywood.

The Energy Tax

The tragedy is that this culture of fear creates a massive tax on human energy. I calculate that I spend roughly 57 percent of my working life translating corporate-speak back into English. It’s a waste of the only non-renewable resource we have. When a press release says, ‘We are actioning a paradigm shift to leverage next-generation synergies for enhanced stakeholder value,’ it is actively stealing time from every person who has to read it. They aren’t just confused; they are being gaslit. They are being told that if they don’t understand this nonsense, it’s because they aren’t ‘strategic’ enough. But there is no strategy there. There is only a void dressed in a suit. I’ve seen 7-figure deals stall because the contract was so poorly written that neither legal team could agree on what the words actually meant. They were arguing over ghosts.

Sometimes, the clutter is physical as well as verbal. We surround ourselves with noise to distract from a lack of direction. This is why I find myself gravitating toward environments that refuse to participate in the obfuscation. There is a profound relief in walking into a space that is exactly what it claims to be. It’s the same feeling you get when you stop reading a 197-page white paper and instead look at a well-designed piece of architecture. There is a clarity there that doesn’t need to apologize for itself. This is what Slat Solution offers-a return to the tactile, the honest, and the clear. In a world of verbal fog, the clean lines of a well-placed slat wall feel like an act of rebellion. It’s a statement that beauty doesn’t need a jargon-filled mission statement to justify its existence. It just is. We need more of that in our writing. We need more things that just *are*.

The Indemnity Style

I’m currently staring at a memo that has 7 bullet points, and I can honestly say that I’ve read it 17 times and still don’t know if I’m supposed to attend the meeting on Tuesday. This is the ‘indemnity’ style of writing. The author has included so many caveats and ‘moving forward’ statements that they have effectively neutralized the message. It reminds me of the time I tried to buy a replacement filter for my vacuum cleaner and found 37 different models that all looked identical but had slightly different serial numbers. I spent 47 minutes on the phone with a customer service representative who kept telling me they were ‘committed to my satisfaction’ without actually telling me which filter to buy. It’s a circular trap. The more we talk about ‘clarity’ and ‘transparency,’ the more we actually practice them. It’s a compensatory mechanism. The loudest person in the room is usually the one with the least to say, and the longest report is usually the one with the fewest ideas.

“Business writing is the opposite [of Foley art]. It takes something real-a new project, a change in direction, a genuine mistake-and rubs it with enough ‘corporate dish soap’ until it sounds like nothing at all. It removes the ‘monstrosity’ of truth.”

– Natasha R.-M., Foley Artist

The Weaponized Boredom

If you write a simple sentence, you are vulnerable. If you say, ‘We are losing money because our product is too expensive,’ you can be challenged. People can look at the data and disagree. But if you say, ‘Current market headwinds are creating a misalignment between our value proposition and consumer price-elasticity thresholds,’ you have created a fog. No one can easily disagree with a fog. You have successfully hidden the fact that you don’t know how to fix the problem. This is why we see 77-slide decks that could have been a single graph. The slides aren’t there to inform; they are there to overwhelm. They are a weaponized form of boredom intended to induce a state of compliance in the audience. By slide 57, most people have stopped asking questions and just want to go home. The presenter wins by attrition.

The Battle for Attention (Illustrative Data)

Natasha R.-M. once showed me a trick she used for a horror movie. To create the sound of a monster’s skin stretching, she used an old piece of wet leather and some dish soap. It sounded terrifyingly real. Business writing is the opposite. It takes something real-a new project, a change in direction, a genuine mistake-and rubs it with enough ‘corporate dish soap’ until it sounds like nothing at all. It removes the ‘monstrosity’ of truth. But we need the truth, even when it’s monstrous. We need to know if the project is failing. We need to know if the budget is gone. I’ve spent $777 on software that promised to ‘streamline my workflow’ through ‘AI-driven insights,’ only to find out it was just a glorified calendar. The marketing copy was brilliant in its vagueness. It promised everything and committed to nothing.