A literal bullshit detector

[wshaffer]

Just discovered the lovely site www.fightthebull.com, which is run by some consultants dedicated to eradicating all the bull that creeps into corporate speak. They've just published a book entitled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots that I'd really like to read. But they also have this cute Mystery Matador web app, where you can put in up to 20,000 characters of text and it will analyze it for corporate bull and Flesch reading-ease score. And optionally, send an anonymous email message to the recipient of your choice.

I'll will confess to having spent a while running various recent corporate communications through the app (without sending any emails). Actually, it's confirmed what I already knew: Though somewhat plagued by people who write overly long sentences, my workplace is largely bull free. Despite a weakness for words like "enterprise" and "ecosystem".

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I approve of *someone* campaigning for clear English over here. And not just in the corporate world: government forms seem to be written in their own bureaucratic idiolect.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read an article in the Society for Technical Communications magazine not long ago which analyzed the language used in government documents and concluded that you pretty much have to learn a specialized language to understand them. I think they had some calculation of the amount of money and time that could be saved if you got someone to rewrite the documents in plain English - it was pretty staggering.