Attack of the Zombie Copy
by Erin Kissane
You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains:
Leveraging world class infrastructure strengths, mature quality processes and industry benchmarked people management practices…
Findings are recorded in a carefully architected summary that crystallizes the intent of the nation to increase its innovation capacity in a variety of modern economic scenarios…
Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies…
It’s a partnering-with-partners strategy…
Taken from life
These reports, incredible as they may seem, are not the results of mass hysteria. Every one of the preceding examples was taken from a live, public website. Tragically, the corruption has spread even beyond the vasty deep of the internet: the back of the milk carton in my refrigerator reads: “Few beverages can beat milk in terms of a total nutrition package.”
As you can see, the scourge is upon us, and we must, every one of us, be prepared to fight. Prominent undead expert Dr. Herbert West, of Miskatonic University, suggests the following course of action if you’re attacked by zombie content:
Let’s apply this process to Patient #226, currently strapped to a gurney in the hall and snapping at the nurses. (Anonymity shall of course be preserved to maintain patient confidentiality. Even zombies have rights.)
Incorporating our corporate culture into our business processes and customer needs, we continue to leverage our exceptional and effective work practices, improve operational effectiveness to meet business objectives and create win-win situations for our employees and shareholders.
Clear the airways
First, time to strip out those modifiers to see what we’re trying to say. When we can’t eliminate them, we’ll flip them around to clarify meaning. Thus, “operational effectiveness” becomes, “the effectiveness of our operations.” We can also replace the worst buzzwords with meaningful terms.
Incorporating the culture of our business into our processes and the needs of our customers, we continue to use our effective work practices, improve the effectiveness of our operations to meet objectives and create mutually satisfying situations for our employees and shareholders.
Expose the brain
And now it’s time for the heavy work—paraphrasing in conversational English, one idea at a time. Note: the company behind this copy isn’t a consultancy, so we can assume they’re speaking only of their own practices, culture, etc.
And there you have it. Don’t expect it to tango; it has a broken back. Time to destroy it and start over.
Oh my God! They’re using adverbs!
Let’s try again with a more docile patient—also, unfortunately, drawn from an actual website.
Every executive knows that constantly delivering superior customer value is an imperative to veritably creating shareholder value.
Veritably!
In this sad case, we find prolapsed adverbs, suppurating adjectives, and a nasty case of the fluff. This one’s short, so we can do the trim and paraphrase in one pass, but our job is made trickier by the fact that this example uses the extremely vague term “value” not once, but twice. We don’t have time for niceties—there’s a strange shuffling sound coming from the hall—so we’ll make do with our best guess about what they mean.
If you want to make lots of money, you have to please your customers more than the other guy does.
Well land sakes; I do believe there’s a real idea under all that dirt. Send this one off to the recovery room; it’s not particularly original, but it might yet pull through.
There, pretty as a picture
Even good writers can produce zombie copy under the pressure of impossible deadlines—and sometimes you arrive in a town only after it’s been taken over by the living dead. In other cases, the zombification progresses so gradually that you don’t realize it’s happening until your “About Us” page begins to smell bad and tries to bite your face.
Nevertheless, prevention is always easier than cure, especially when the cure involves a hand grenade. You can keep copy from turning zombie by starting with a clear idea of exactly what you want to say. It’s tempting to just start writing, but this approach can leave your pages vulnerable to zombification, because it’s easier to sound like you’re making sense than to actually make sense. Outlines can serve as an effective vaccine against living death.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go deal with my zombie milk. 
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About the Author
Erin Kissane is a writer and editorial strategist as well as a contributing editor to A List Apart. She writes about writing at Incisive.nu. A longer bio is available at Happy Cog.
