The Corporate/Professional Language Translator

For anyone working in Washington, DC, or nearby, I strongly recommend Edwin Newman's two books: Strictly Speaking, and A Civil Tongue.

They're a bit dated at this point, but still (IMHO) very valid.

 

My first professional job out of college was difficult for a number of reasons that looking back on it I know now that I am better at interactions than I was then. In other words it was me and my lack of experience that was the problem.

For example there were people under me who very much resented the new person being in charge over them. There was a lot of backstabbing that resulted. Now I know more how to handle being the new person, how to compliment people and still give them assignments/orders.

And as a new person with lots of ideas how to improve things I know to wait about six months before making suggestions. I feel more skilled and knowledgeable doing that rather than resentful I think they could be doing things better.

 

I'd say that makes it slang. And slang should be avoided in business communication.

 

Really? That's surprising given it makes no sense grammatically.

How very odd.

Your point is valid though, avoid colloquialisms.

 

Im not denying your point and im not advocating for the use of the saying (see my 2nd post on this thread).
Im just saying that its a regional thing and its not as "out there" as everyone makes it seem

 

Understood. And yes this is an international forum, which means i personally am more lenient with certain things (spelling, grammar, punctuations, word usage). I chalk it up to "ok. Not american terms. Cool beans"
I dont immediately default to "no one knows what that means" and "you're the only one who understands that" (because there are going to be people who DO understand).
The correct thing to do is say "oh, i dont know what that means"... Not "no one knows what that means"

 

My guess is that "you're being extra" is a new phrase common among the younger generation, similar to the way "I can't even" has grown the past 10-20 years.

There was an Onion article (I think) about that one, but I can't find it, about a woman afflicted with a 'can't even' that wouldn't stop, quoting her as saying that most of her 'can't evens' are caused by cute cat videos or rude people but usually only last a few minutes.

 

Yup. I did only indicate *my* confusion at the term though.

 

Since we're being honest and blunt, there's an aspect of this discussion I can't resist commenting on.

You're admittedly a newcomer not just to this profession but to the career job market in general. You've been at it a whopping six months, and you're frustrated with people who have been in business for decades. Your reviews suggest to me your superiors think you have an attitude. If I had a nickel for every applicant I spoke with who had a few months or a year in our profession who thought they knew more about the field than I, who had been in various positions over decades, I wouldn't be rich but I'd have a lot of nickels. I don't know how great your education was or how intelligent you are, but you can't just walk into any profession and act like you have more knowledge and experience than people who have been in the business for longer than you've been alive. If you're really that good, start your own business and prove your ideas superior because you'll never be happy working for some old fogies who make you "adapt to their nonsense."

A "very corporate environment" doesn't really say much other than having a negative attitude toward the workplace. A "corporate environment" doesn't come across as a compliment, and a "very corporate environment" seems to lend itself to the interpretation that you mean "very bad."

I have no idea what you mean by, "trying to survive late-stage capitalism." That's a curious statement for someone who is six months into their profession. Again, this suggests attitude rather than confidence of your knowledge and experience.

As I think my previous post indicated, if you have to blow smoke and fake politeness, you're probably not in a good company. It's not because of "corporate" this or that, or "capitalism" this or that, it's working in a company that is not well managed.

My sincere advice, as someone who has gone through more than 30 years in my profession and retired, to someone who is just starting on their career journey, don't swagger into a company thinking you have better ideas than everybody else. If you want success with this company, I suggest getting a bit of humility and trying to learn from those crusty old veterans, rather than thinking it's all nonsense and you know better.

Or send it to your boss. That would be funny. Let us know how it goes!

 

Well said.

For most of us, we're not tip-toeing around or walking on eggshells. We're just experienced enough to write and talk that way without even thinking about it. It's no big deal.

Think about it like this. You walk into a shop where you're intending to spend a lot of money. You browse around for a while. A shop assistant comes over to you and says "Make up your mind already!". How are you going to feel?

 

to the OP, it seems to me the problem is simply that you are using colloquialisms and expressions that your co-workers might not understand or might deem too friendly. Then you can just use standard English. If they complain again, then you will know they expect you to adopt a specific kind of language. If still in doubt just ask your boss what she means by unprofessional and how you can improve. She will appreciate your openness to change. This is a good time to ask this kind of questions, because you have been working there just for a few months with no or little experience, so you are there to learn.

I have seen that happen a number of times. In my experience people act scared but don't really feel so, however, they do feel confused/shocked by the unexpected event. After the event they hold onto being scared to maintain a position of favor with others. I think it's part of the working dynamics.

 

To address a few concerns:
1) I haven't said explicitly what I do because I'm new here and all of you are perfect strangers. It's a matter of privacy, not fear of judgment.
2) I'm not a consultant, but I do provide a service that involves interacting with our clientele on a regular basis.
3) I did not and would never call a client extra to their face. I'm not that stupid. It's why I created this thread asking for other options.
4) We were waiting on them to submit a concept, so we could actually start working on developing it. We'd had a meeting with them already where they expressed several ideas, and we all but told them "let us know what you decide, and we'll start building it." And instead, they let us know more ideas. All of them were great, but we were on a tight timeline and needed to get into production and out of brainstorming. They were holding us back with their overproduction, and I wanted to smack 'em upside the head and say "Stop being extra. It doesn't have to be perfect or entirely fleshed out, it just needs to be an idea. But it needs to only be one."
5) I ended up going with a combination of @Catriona Grace, @Bruce Johnson, and @J.T. Woody's suggestions: "Thank you for all these amazing ideas. I've made a poll to help narrow down the list. Please vote by X date."
6) The misunderstanding around "extra" in this thread is my exact point about professional talk and why I have difficulty with it in my workplace. "Extra" is very common slang to people my age. It's so popular, it's used in the Broadway musical Six about Henry VIII's wives (Someone asks Anne Boleyn if Henry actually cut her head off and she replies, "Yeah. It was so extra."). It's not entirely a negative connotation because it can mean everything from "putting in too much effort" to "perfectionism" to "going above and beyond." It just means you're doing more than what's necessary. I've been called extra for color-coding my planner by subject area, and while accurate, it's not a complaint.

It was another error of mine not knowing my audience because I assumed this forum would have more young people experiencing the same problem than it turned out to have. But that generational confusion is precisely the issue I'm consistently running into at work. Like I said, my coworkers and my clientele tend to be 2-3 generations my senior. This means that they don't understand my pop culture references (such as memes, which despite having a political figure in them are pretty strictly bipartisan) and they have a fondness for traditionalism that I do not share.

As a rule, I do not like professionalism. The fact that I am expected to avoid slang, memes, jokes, and anything along those lines because then I might not be taken seriously is frustrating to me because these are the methods of communication my generation has developed to better understand and interact with each other and the world around us. Corporate language does not make sense to me in the same way my Gen Z slang did not make sense to many of you. I called this thread "Translator" because I wanted a translation from slang to corporate, but you can't translate something if you don't speak both languages. To be honest, I think the only person here who does speak both to some degree is @J.T. Woody. So, @GingerCoffee was right that there was a translation error when it came to my use of "extra," but not from a non-English language to English. It was a mistranslation between generational vernaculars.

And this mistranslation happens to me on a daily basis because I am the only Gen Z employee in my office. There's a language barrier I didn't even know existed until I got hired. Hence my frustration.

EDIT: Things were posted after I started drafting this that I had not seen, and I went back and reread some of what had already been posted, and I want to clarify that there are several people who I think understand my position and how to make it fit into a corporate environment more than just JT. And thank you to all of you who have given me genuinely helpful advice for this.

 

I believe J.T. was chastising me. Given that several people initially responded that they had no idea what "You're being extra" meant, I extrapolated to suggest that nobody knew what it means.

My bad. But even if 100% of the people within the Washington beltway understand it, that leaves a lot of people in the real world who don't. And that brings me back to the premise that in communication, 90% of the burden for understanding falls on the sender. In business communication, it's never a good idea to use slang, idioms, jargon, etc. that won't (or may not) be understood by a significant proportion of the audience. The problem this poses for young people just entering the working world after college is that they have just spent several years in a closed environment wherein most of the people they associated with spoke with the same slang, so it may be difficult to divine what's slang vs. what's standard English.

But ... the bottom line is that business communication should, almost always, use standard, formal (or at least semi-formal) English, not slang.

 

This Twitter thread is what I was going for.

Or this TikTok.

 

Even those of us who are multiple generations older than you once went through the same adjustment you are now going through. It's a rite of passage. We are not unsympathetic to your situation; quite the opposite. I think we're all trying to help. Naturally, some advice will be more palatable to you than other, but that doesn't mean the parts you have trouble with weren't offered in good faith.

You came here and posted because you wanted help with the "generational confusion." You won't get help with that from people of your generation, who use and understand the same slang you use. Your problem is communicating effectively with the older people both within your organization and in your client base. And, since professionalism in your communications was specifically mentioned in your performance evaluation, it IS a problem. However, I have to say that you do not seem to be receptive to constructive suggestions. You are still railing against the fact that the professional workplace expects you to communicate professionally. I respectfully submit that that approach won't serve you well.

Respectfully, there's a fundamental error in thinking here. Your generation may (or may not) have developed your slang and idioms "to better understand and interact with each other and the world around [you.]" As a long-time student of linguistics, I would suggest that each generation develops its own patois not to better communicate with the world, but rather to better communicate with others of the same generation while intentionally EXCLUDING older generations. I'm not referring just to your Gen Z. I grew up in the 1950s -- I graduated from high school in 1962. My generation had slang terms that my parents and grandparents didn't "get." That's why we used them -- it was a form of rebellion. Every generation seems to do this. And it works for as long as we are mostly within the bubble of our own generation. Once we're in the real world, though, if/when our generation's particular vernacular doesn't work, it is we who have to adapt to the real world; we can't expect the entire world to adapt to our generation's private language.

By and large, "corporate" language is standard English. If standard English doesn't make sense to you, I think you will have to make an effort to learn it. It shouldn't be difficult, unless you are totally set on resisting it. Standard English can be found everywhere: newspapers, magazines, books ... even advertising, if you look at advertising that's not aimed specifically at your generation. You didn't know that a language barrier existed prior to entering the working world because (I suspect) you communicated mostly with people of your own age, so you didn't encounter it. Now you have encountered it, and it has been mentioned as an issue in your performance review. Basically, I think you have two options: You can either resolve to learn to communicate more effectively and more professionally, or you can can complain about how unfair it is that your employer expects you to communicate clearly and you can reject advice from anyone who isn't young enough to understand your slang.

If you wish to pursue the first option, I'm sure everyone here will be happy to help in whatever way we can.

 

@SapereAude , I totally think you are missing the point of the OP's thread.

It was meant to be: "how do i translate my slang response into corporate lingo?"
To which the OP received suggestions and utilized them.
One would think that it is now time to move on to the next slang-to-corporate dilemma.

What this has become is a lecture that im sure the OP already knows and has had before.
Assumptions are being made about the OP that are straying away from the initial reason for this thread.

If you answered the initial question, cool. I personally dont understand why you keep hammering away at this additional point that you're trying to make.

You, sir, are being too extra.....

 

It sounds to me you are taking being professional to mean you have to erase part of your identity (the language and knowledge your generation shares and that represents who you are). You are right in complaining that it is not right people don't take you seriously if you use your generational language and knowledge, diminishing who you are. But I would recommend making the consideration that it might be equally frustrating for them to interact with someone who brings about all sort of pop culture knowledge they don't have, hindering communication. To acquire a certain amount of pop culture references might require time and effort. Maybe this is why they are resisting. So, they might want just easier communication, and are not thinking about what it means to you not be able to use language that means so much to you on a personal level.

 

There's an example of a generational difference right there.

Twitter posts (tweets?) are limited to 280 characters. I can't even say "Good morning" in 280 characters. TikTok videos were originally limited to 60 seconds. That was bumped up to 3 minutes and I believe it is now (or soon will be) 10 minutes.

For both, the original intention was to pop something out with little investment in time or effort, and that would not require any investment of time or effort on the part of the audience to view or read the post or video. This is something we olde phartes continually complain about with the younger generations -- we olde phartes tend to want to communicate in ideas and concepts that are relatively complete. We perceive young people today as not being able to communicate in or to communicate in anything longer than sound bites.

Your opening post in this thread is an example. First, whether for brevity or for privacy, you intentionally told us nothing about the context of the communication you wanted help translating. Second, you assumed that everyone reading it would or should know what "You're being extra" means, but that was what you needed a translation of. A longer post, explaining the situation, would likely have advanced the discussion a lot faster, As it was, it took a dozen or so posts before we even began to have the information needed to help you with rephrasing the statement.

Clear communication avoids unnecessary embellishment, but it has to include all the needed information. Approaching communication with a Twitter/TikTok 280 characters/"sound bites" approach isn't particularly effective in a corporate environment. Corporate communication needs to be like Goldilocks and the things she found in the three bears' home -- the right approach is neither too much nor too little. The trick is figuring out how much is "just right."

 

a) Because I'm a pedant

b) Because I think she doesn't understand how corporate communication works. It's not as simple as "translate this phrase for me." We can't rewrite every phrase for her -- she needs (I think) to understand why she needs a translator in the first place.

 

This is exactly why I'm resistant to it. It feels like a loss of individualism and a stripping of my authenticity. It also boils me down to only the parts that the company deems useful, and I'm repeatedly told that my youth is not an asset. In fact, it's a hindrance. And @SapereAude, that's what I'm hearing from you too.

I don't need anyone to remind me that I'm young, and I certainly don't need to hear any implications that being young makes me less intelligent. I know that I know less than most people because I have a lack of experience. But, I would like to not be dismissed out of hand because of it. I would like to be able to be myself, youth and inexperience in all, and still be respected as a member of the workforce.

And I would like to have it recognized that I am trying to learn. I asked for help when I knew I needed it. And, thankfully, I got it.

 

It sounds like you might be in the wrong line of work. If you don't like being expected to behave professionally you shouldn't be working in a professional environment. Seems pretty simple.

 

I got into consistantly working with corporate, sales, and customers early on as well, and my biggest takeaway so far is that professionalism doesn't mean speaking a different language, it means communicating as efficiently as possible in the most generally understood language between all parties. And remembering who you are to the company in which you are employed.

The fact of the matter is, in the corporate world, communication is everything. If they don't like how you're communicating, or you aren't communicating in a manner as deemed effective by the management, then you aren't going to be an effective employee to them. If established staff have to learn a new parts of the language to accommodate you, then you are slowing down the efficiency of this business. This doesn't mean changing everything about who you are or sucking up to a manager, unless that's your thing. It does, however, demand that you understand the party in which you are speaking to and their relative rank within a company. It demands that you utilize the relative common language trends across the field and especially the ones understood by your customers and management. The language adjusts to what is understood by the majority of the customers in general. Just like any true language, it doesn't translate word for word to another. You need to be up to speed on the language utilized by the company.

In six months time, you should have noticed this. If this showed up in your review, that's a grave problem. It tells them you're unwilling to conform to their accepted communication standards in the professional environment. And from personal experience, it takes some serious moves and time to fix that negative spotlight. Eight months for me and a multi-million dollar sign-off a month early, to be precise. But it can certainly be done. You just need to read how your next level position holders construct their correspondence and then apply it. And for God's sake, make sure you communicate in a timely manner and have an excellent email signature.

As for being young, yes, that will constantly work against you. I know. Almost all FSEs in my field are above the age of forty. I'm barely into my thirties and started in my mid twenties. I'm a child for them to chastise, often, or I'm questioned about my qualifications and years with the company by customers constantly. Get used to it. The best way to shut these people up is to ignore it and speak/correspond with them in the exact professional manner in which a director level should expect. Be more professional than the people directly above you. Never show your generation in the language you use. Act as your position, and not as the individual. You're paid to represent that position in the company, not your own eccentricities. You go from the kid to the established lead real fast with that sort of moving approach.

An no, you don't need to be stuffy. You can have fun with it, just know your audience and who's attached (cc'd) well.

 

I don't know about your coworkers, but this thread is way more extra than I expected.

gee pops, thanks

 

Sorry to add to it. It kind of became my life a few years ago though, so I figured I'd say something.