Bucking business gobbledegook

30.08.2003

By IRENE CHAPPLE

Almost 5000 people in Australasia have decided to tackle corporate bull with a computer program released by Deloitte Consulting.

Bullfighter, released in June, has now been downloaded by more than 4700 people (track it down from the website at www.dc.com).

The bull-alert program identifies jargon in corporate and other documents.

Deloitte partner Wendy Lai said Bullfighter had been welcomed by the firm’s corporate customers.

She said reaction to Bullfighter included comments that it was about time staff were alerted to meaningless terms in letters, reports and other documents.

The language-policing programme was introduced by the global consulting giant after the Enron collapse as a move to help regenerate trust among consumers.

Lai said running Bullfighter through Enron’s corporate communications found the documents became more obtuse the deeper the company sank into the accounting scandal that eventually led to its bankruptcy.

Deloitte staff gathered bull words to create a bullfighting dictionary. About 5000 bull words were suggested.

These included common horrors such as paradigm shift, leverage, pure play and touch base. The Bullfighter program identifies bull words, ticks off the user for lax editing and suggests replacement words or terms.

Lai said Deloitte staff were shocked when they realised how much jargon was slipping through in their documents.

A sentence that she used as an example – “If a solid value proposition is the best way to inoculate stakeholders, there needs to be a frictionless way to articulate it” – was ripped apart by Bullfighter.

The program suggested it be reworded as “we need an easy way to justify our work.”

The stock exchange’s 16-page argument for retaining a local bias of superannuation funds, published in June, did not impress Bullfighter.

The argument, which introduces itself by declaring there is “compelling evidence that a substantial home bias in asset allocation is strongly economically rational and a prescription for the road forward”, is rated 3.5 on the overall Bull Composite Index (where 1 is the worst and 10 the best).

Bullfighter congratulates the NZX for use of standard words but condemns it for convoluted sentence structure.

In that category, the document is “despairing of bringing a sentence to a close with something as demeaningly ordinary as a simple period”.

The program also notes: “You shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose.”

A Herald story on the corngate inquiry rated a respectable 6.9, although it was criticised for its meaning, which “teetered on the edge of unclear … It becomes possible to lose oneself in corollary thoughts.”

Highest rating in the Business Herald’s experiment went to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, delivered in 1863 and often praised as one of the most stirring pieces of rhetoric in the English language.

It scored 8.6 on the Bull Composite Index and was congratulated for being “bull-free”.

It was, however, ticked off for its occasionally long-winded sentences, such as the final declaration that ” … this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.