July 28, 2010

This blog article seems to me to encapsulates much of what might be called ‘Analyst Wankery’.

Lang Riley, self-styled ‘serial entrepreneur’, has written this article to provide a background on why he has chosen DEVONthink and DEVONagent to manage his personal information.

My gripe with this article is that Riley appears to be completely unable to write a simple, concise sentence without masturbating all his SEO-speak ‘expertise’ throughout the article. For instance the aim of the article is to…

“make a case for an improved information acquisition, categorization, and retrieval process as a facilitator for business intelligence with a deliverable of an externalized knowledgebase”

On the other hand, I think we should consider ourselves lucky that Riley has produced this article at all. He doesn’t “like doing post-ops/post-mortems on research findings too much as it doesn’t involve forward motion for me”.

I’ve nothing against the guy personally but I think it’s a damn fine example of the sort of self-aggrandizing, corporate bullshit writing that’s really common on the Internet, with people trying to be clever instead of just doing stuff and making things. I’d make people who write like this read real writers like Elmore Leonard, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway until they realise what it means to write well.

Stephen King put it well

“Remove every extraneous word
You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again — or try something new.”

Feels good to rant!

Writing


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