So where does bad copy come from? Sometimes it’s bad writing. Sometimes it’s a bad brief.

Quite a lot of the time, it’s bad attitude. If whoever is reviewing or signing off the copy is thinking solely about what’s great about the product and/or has very rigid views about how things should or should not be written, the effect on clarity can be severe. And somewhere between the first and the final draft, the copy gets beaten up. It’s a bit like the tree swing diagram, which can be adapted for just about any creative discipline from advertising to software engineering.

Because we can’t draw,  we thought we would have a go at doing a written illustration of what happens to make good business writing go bad. It’s a fictional, highly simplified but not entirely unrealistic example of what we could impolitely call the ‘bullshitification’ process.

Here’s the first draft, which the copywriter thinks pretty much nails it:

CustomerLocate clean

And here are the comments, from an internal executive who we’ll call ‘John Doe’. As you’ll see, John has strong views about the first draft. Too much about benefits, not enough about the product. And a flip tone of voice that just doesn’t convey the gravity of the company’s serious products.

CustomerLocate commented

And the finished article, delivered to a delighted John Doe by a weeping copywriter.

CustomerLocate final

Next time come you across some impenetrable marketing copy, an overlong and self-congratulatory press release or website that makes you wonder why you visited it, chances are it could be because ultimately, the customer is always right.

Spotted on Brough station. From the art direction, to the typography to the words themselves, this could be textbook example of how not to do it.

Savour in particular the second paragraph of body copy, which conjures up an image of station staff yelling, gobbing and using foul language to control yobbish behaviour.

Surely ads can't get worse than this

This struck a chord with me, as someone who worshipped at the altar of Derrida and fellow post-structuralists in my final year at university, only to realise in later life that much of their obfuscation was far from meaningful. It’s hard to disagree with Cohen’s position when you tackle the worst examples of the genre, as in the Bad Writing Contest to which he links. I believe it was Derrida who suggested that meaning constantly evades the reader: it certainly hides itself pretty well in paragraphs like this:

A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a différance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues – for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated – to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.

And this is at the more comprehensible end of the genre. Incidentally that paragraph scores 42.9 on the Fog Index, one of Plain Text’s favourite readability measures. That’s so far off the scale it defies belief. (Decently readable business copy scores 12-18).

Surely a defining moment for this movement came when cheeky physics professor Alain Sokal had Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in the journal Social Text. While the journal interpreted it as a welcome rapprochement from the science community to its way of thinking, it was in fact a load of utter nonsense. A clever hoax designed to hoist the post-structuralists et al with their own petard.

Whether or not academic psychobabble has a direct link to the Conservative government’s plans to cut arts and humanities funding will no doubt be a matter of ferocious – and doubtless occasionally impenetrable – debate.

But perhaps it’s a terrible lesson to us all that you can only write so much nonsense before the bullshit bites back.

Am I missing something – or doesn’t that make three teenage youths?

Perhaps the word ‘youth’ now refer exclusively to males in the Telegraph’s world.

And youths or teenagers, would suffice, surely?

Has the Times fallen victim to a cunning internet wind-up akin to the superb Yu Wan Mei website? Heaven help the English language if the Queen’s English Society is setting the clarity standards. Check out this text from the  home page:

“Our language faces a number of challenges, as it becomes ever more widely used by people with ever less knowledge of it and respect for it.”

Or this humdinger of a sentence, which suffers from a condition that can only be described as ‘commaohrrea’

“The Queen’s English Society will always welcome new members who have some sympathy with our aims, but we also hope this website and, in particular, The English Academy, will benefit all who wish to improve their own use of the language and also those who teach English, professionally, or indeed, as parents.”

Give me a witty 140-character tweet or text message any day.