I recently read this personal profile that someone had posted online and I feel compelled to share my chagrin:
An individual who is passionate about continuous improvement and someone who can influence equally and effectively upwards as well as through their team members. With strong business acumen and vision to strategise and chart new territories to create new business opportunities. A bright, articulate, commercially aware individual used to working to tight deadlines, under pressure and using their own initiative. Coming from a proactive sales background, can work independently or within a team.
I’m not singling out the person who wrote this as a bad apple; I read this sort of stuff a lot, especially on CVs and “About us” pages and it drives me nuts.
I have specific reasons for being offended by this sort of thing:
- No personality
Why does the author refer to themself as “An individual who is…” when they could just say “I am…”? It’s much shorter and easier to read, it conveys more warmth and would make the whole thing read less like a police report.
- No message
What marks them out from the crowd? What are they offering me, the reader? We know they are from a sales background but we don’t know if they are a market stall trader or a sales director at a large multinational. They make no effort to explain exactly who they are and how their sales skills can help me.
- No effort
It’s largely gobbledegook; just lots of unnecessarily long words and meaningless phrases shoved on a page to fill up a bit of space. If the author can’t be bothered to write something that makes sense and explains what they do why should I be bothered to read it?
- Just plenty of repetition
If you read each of the sentences in the paragraph separately from each other they all pretty much say the same thing: “I can work well on my own or as part of a team”. That particular sentence has to be the most common sentence I have ever seen on a CV. This tells me the person didn’t have much to say but decided to fill the space anyway.
Am I being a bit grumpy because it’s a Monday?
It’s 1st August and it’s Yorkshire Day so, as a Bradford-born whippet chaser, I have a special licence to be a mardy get today of all days.
But that doesn’t change the fact that this sort of slap-dash approach to copy writing is just wrong.
The author wrote this for me to read so that I might potentially do business with them in the future. For the reasons I have given above I’m not interested in making a connection, which surely means they have failed to achieve their goal.
Remember your goal, always
The most saddening thing about this kind of copy is it doesn’t take a great deal more effort to get it right. Simply ask yourself “What is the copy trying to acheive” at every turn.
In this instance the author was trying to convey who they are in a concise way and encourage people to connect with them online.; a sort of 20 second elevator pitch. So if that’s the goal why would they create 166 words of waffly prose?
