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Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak, Jargon and Waffle [Paperback]

Tim Phillips (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 3 Sep 2011 | ISBN-10: 0749463643 | ISBN-13: 978-0749463649

Tim Phillips has been a journalist for 20 years, and during that time he has been slowly driven crazy by bad spokespeople: the jargon, the evasiveness, the inability to make a point or to answer a direct question. Now that every company has a small army dedicated to communications, the problem seems to be getting worse. That's why we should stop thinking about spin and management, and start concentrating on talking like human beings. Is this possible?

Talk Normal is an attempt to find out. Based on the author's blog, www.talknormal.co.uk it's full of excruciating examples of corporate jargon, and it will help you to steer a path to better communication, whilst coping with the worst excesses of management speak at work.

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Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak, Jargon and Waffle + The Language of Leaders: How Top CEOs Communicate to Inspire, Influence and Achieve Results
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Product details

  • Paperback: 184 pages
  • Publisher: Kogan Page (3 Sep 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0749463643
  • ISBN-13: 978-0749463649
  • Product Dimensions: 14 x 1.4 x 21.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 494,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Tim Phillips
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Review

"...your new favourite book has arrived: in Talk Normal, a spin-off from his blog, journalist Tim Phillips gathers together evidence of scores of crimes against language, especially in the business world, charting the rise of "blue skies thinking," "low-hanging fruit" and others. It's great fun, but it also makes the crucial point that jargon makes it harder to understand what you're going on about" (The Observer )

Book Description

Talk Normal is about corporate jargon, waffle and poor business communication. Full of shocking examples, it will help you to improve your own communication style whilst navigating the nightmare of management speak at work.
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Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A hilarious, no-holds-barred manifesto against gobbledygook 24 July 2012
By Rolf Dobelli TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
Journalist Tim Phillips prides himself on opposing gobbledygook - words that mean nothing and expressions that obscure meaning. He takes up the cudgel against jargon, "business speak" and perplexing political phrasemaking. He's a keen observer, but his book is not a narrative; it's a repurposing - with some honing - of his blog posts. Some of the short chapters are hilarious, some are insightful and some are worth skipping altogether. Phillips's tone is never genteel, and given the jumpy, episodic nature of the material, you might not work up quite as much umbrage as he does. But you might learn something about English and, if you love language and grammar, getAbstract thinks you will be amused by his well-meaning rants.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Some good observations 8 Dec 2011
By Daniel Park TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
I agree with the previous reviewer that this book is essentially a series of blogs and very much reads like one. There's a sense that the author is trying too hard to be eye-wideningly novel and side-splittingly witty on each and every page - and the result probably works better on the screen than it does on the page, where his style - especially the "same joke" graphs which seem to appear on almost every page - does become a little wearing.

That said, there were some really good observations in Philips' work. I was particularly taken by the "Picking a puppy" section where you are encouraged to choose the one important thing you want to communicate to people and stick to that, rather than going into lists of 3 or 5 (which is the traditional approach to "Death by PowerPoint" presentations) It doesn't say you can only talk about one thing, but that you should make very VERY sure the other things you want to say directly relate to that one thing. The human brain can't cope with all the lists we deal with today, and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, having nursed my own poor sore list-addled brain for many a year!
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing 27 Nov 2011
By woollers
Format:Paperback
Started well but soon became nothing more than a list of jargon words. Reads like a compilation of "blogs" which I suppose is just what it is.
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