![]() ![]() Avoid jargon, clichés and insider metaphors. As much as you may feel pressure to use the fancy words in your industry, stick with clear, descriptive language. Your instinct to keep things clean and simple is right. There is a conspiracy cooked up by marketing wonks, consultants and executives to pay for words by the pound, and to question the intelligence of a corporate “professional” who does not create complex and obtuse presentations. They could have saved 299.9 slides and 4 hours worth of my billable time if they had just said those four words. Finally, once I was able to corner a smart-looking person, I said “Can you tell me in 10 words or less what this project is about?” “Sure,” he said. And I was no green bean I had participated in large projects in large organizations for many years. At the end of the presentation, although I wouldn’t admit it to anyone in public, I still had no idea what the project was about. For four hours, I sat in a dark conference room with a bunch of serious-looking executives and listened to an “overview” presentation that was a minimum of 300 PowerPoint slides, with eye-crossing graphs, charts and bullets. In my prior days as a management consultant, I was brought into a project at a large multinational company with short notice and no information. How can we clean up our writing so that we evoke the spirit of a well-written children’s book? Some thoughts: “And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”Īs readers, we hunger for clear, useful, insightful and inspiring words.Īs writers, we long to speak the truth and say something relevant and important.īut somehow in our professional lives, we are taught to convolute, complicate and butcher perfectly good language when communicating with users, clients, customers, employees and partners. ![]() Of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking onceĪnd they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teethĪnd rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws I had forgotten how ripe and tantalizing the words were perfectly chosen, crisp, simple and powerful:Īnd when he came to the place where the wild things are Sadly, we do have to move it up a couple notches for using the word "rumpus.As soon as I read this passage to my three-year old from the classic book Where the Wild Things Are, I felt a wave of pleasure and a flash back to my own childhood. It's just a kid, lost in in his own imagination, commanding his imaginary friends to get the party started. You don't get much pretension in kids' books, generally, and this one is no exception. If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10. If nothing else, it will be harder for her to reason with you if you're acting totally nuts. If your mother ever looks you sternly in the eyes and tells you to cease your "wild rumpus," just do what Max would have done: don a wolf costume and go on an adventure. So the term "wild rumpus" is a fairly common one, and anytime you hear it, you can be sure it's derived from Sendak's classic tale, whether the phrase is altered slightly or preserved in its original wording, as with this " new music collective" or this Minneapolis bookstore. Why? Because we read them as kids, so they've been in our brains longer. Say the words "let the wild rumpus start!" to a group of two-year-olds, and they'll start dancing their toddler butts off.įamous lines from children's books tend to entrench themselves more firmly in our vernacular than do lines from adult books. But who are we to question the king of chidlren's lit? Where you've heard it Lots of folks misquote this one as "Let the wild rumpus begin!" And we're gonna be honest: that kinda has a nicer ring to it. It's not especially graceful, but they seem to be having fun with it, so…we won't judge. There's a lot of stomping and bouncing around. In Where the Wild Things Are, a young boy named Max announces the start of the "wild rumpus," in which he and his new wild friends are about to get jiggy with it…in their own special way. Like a roomful of kindergartners on a sugar high right after lunch or that party you threw while your parents were out of town that got so wild it woke up the neighbors. ![]() ![]() Well, it's any sort of loud commotion, really. Who among us doesn't enjoy a good rumpus? We know that any time we've gone more than a week or two without one, we start to suffer from rumpus withdrawal. Friendship Maurice Sendak Dreams Positive Where the Wild Things Are Happy Literature Motivational Experience Relationship Context ![]()
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