10 New Year’s Resolutions — ‘What to do, and how not to do it’

1. Passive voice will not be used in the writing of this author.
   
2. Jargon will be the primary framework for communications from this operational silo.
   
3. We’ll just ignore the buzzword that’s the elephant in the room, and keep our eyes to the ground as we do some blue-sky thinking.
   
4. Something I learned when I studied business administration in 1982, and that I’m sticking to because it’s long-established best practice, is that recommendations in the report come at the end.
   
5. Some of my words will be precise and familiar, but most of my words will be dubious, abstruse, and obfuscatory.
   
6. In order to communicate the least opaque indication that the working group’s combined academic and professional expertise has leveraged our knowledge base in this specialisation, and to optimise our success of this product as a service in advance of its early April launch in San Francisco and Auckland to non-commercial markets, we will require a sentence length of a minimum of 45 words, and preferably in excess of this going forward.
   
7. If you know there’s a word in a sentence that isn’t really adding much to the meaning, then it’s probably what’s called a clutter word, so feel free to leave it out.
   
8. I’ll write the points in a bulleted list to agree with the grammar of the stem so that:
   •   the bullets flow on as if each forms the end of the sentence
   •   their construction is ‘parallel’
   •   check the list is no longer than seven bullets, without a page break,
       and put a full stop at the end
   
9. Don’t make your readers think ‘WT? (what the…?)’. Tell them that acronyms are AOK if every IA, ICBM, LIM, and ITO is spelt out in full the first time it’s used.
   
10. Our agency-wide mar-comms facilitation advisers have enacted for the sake of complete clarification and organisational probity an absolute and binding moratorium on the utilisation of adjectivally rich but potentially ambiguous noun strings.
    
11. And finally, remember… The linguistic construction of normative value(s) furnishes a provisional lens for the analysis of the authentication of linguistic transparency.

(This last one is from the Write your own academic sentence generator. Try it for yourself!)