Why Is Business Writing So Awful?

I read Jason Fried's article "Why is Business Writing So Awful" on the Inc. magazine Web site. He makes a very good point about the way in which business writing is unnecessarily complex, packed with industry buzzwords, and completely lacking in personality. I'd agree with all of this, but I think he completely overlooks the main reason that the text that appears on business sites, and a good many others, is terrible:

The examples that Fried provides, even most of the ones he considers to be "good" writing, all convey information that the reader is highly unlikely to be interested in reading in the context of the task they are presumably trying to accomplish (though I have to concede that, since the examples are taken out of context, there's a chance that a person might want to know a bit about the company's history or corporate practices, I think the chance is slim). It's not enough for writing to be concise, and it's not enough for the company to find a funny and clever way of stating things. The writing must be written to serve the needs of the reader.

In user experience design, a great deal of attention has been paid to the needs and desires of the user. Web sites that force you through an unnecessarily long process that requires you to do unnecessary tasks and provide unnecessary information are far less successful than those that consider what the user wants and needs to do, and requires of them the minimum amount of effort to succeed.

The same principle should be applied to the writing on a Web site - and it is sorely neglected, even by companies that seem to be focused on the user in other regards: consider what the user needs to know, in the context of what they are doing at the time, and inflict upon them the minimum amount of information to succeed.

This will eliminate a vast majority of the long passages of boring text on Web sites (which people have learned that they don't need to read anyway) - and what's left will be information that the user will be genuinely interested in reading.

At that point, per Fried's thesis, you should still hire an editor to make it clear and concise, but copy editing is spit-and-polish - alone, it can't make "bad" text good, only less bad.