Hey, what have shirts got to do with writing?

Well, this is how consultant Dianna Booher describes two styles of writing – at the opposite ends of the spectrum – in her very worthwhile email offering: Communication Tip of the Month.

As we know, different people have different ways of expressing themselves with words. “Stuffed shirt writing” refers to the ultra-formal, stilted, impersonal and stuffy way some folk prefer to write, while the “T-shirt” style is just the opposite: very personal, warm, chatty, and often more than a little bit too informal.

Dianna points out that the “stuffed shirt” variety is as easy to recognize as it is difficult to define: those who use it “bury their ideas in passive verbs. They select weak sentence beginnings and bury key actions…they drape their ideas in trite, verbose, statements.”

The other extreme are writers “who send email that could pass for a T-shirt slogan”!

These people, says Dianna, “use aggressive words and no tact…They ramble on and on, without sorting out the main ideas and details from the irrelevant. They misspell, omit punctuation, and write incomplete thoughts, leaving clarity as the reader’s problem.”

She offers a pointed and instructive sample of each style. No prizes for guessing which is which!

Example One

It can easily be seen that when large volumes of gas are metered and when variations in the gas temperatures become commonplace, the resulting circumstance will be a loss of revenue if corrective action is not taken.

Example Two

Large volumes of METERED gas-big problem-in about two months we’re gonna lose our shirt unless somebody gets off their duff and okays something.

Two sentences, two distinct choices of words and phrases, both purporting to say the same thing. Is either choice music to your ears? I think not.

‘Business Casual’

Diana aptly observes: “Like our work clothes today, the preferred writing style has become business casual. And just as the business casual dress code has some people stumped, so has the business casual writing style.”

And just in case you count yourself among the stumped, she translates the above examples into the “business casual”-or in plainer language, simple and direct-writing style for you. Yes, it’s really as simple as this:

As we meter large volumes of gas, variations in gas temperature will result in lost revenues unless we take corrective action.

Bottom line: in business writing, this is the only acceptable style. T-shirt messages really do belong in the shopping mall, certainly not on your documents. As for stuffed shirts, do they really belong anywhere?

Dianna’s tip was extracted from her book E-Writing, available here.