Corporate writing: the trip to recovery

Hi, my name’s Shannon, it’s been 332 days since I joined Shopify and I think the culture shock is wearing off. Mostly. The thing about culture shock is this: it’s not that it’s a bad thing (kind of like how not all stress is bad) but it’s that it rattles you to the core. It’s like getting off an airplane in a foreign country for the first time. You can see you’re in an airport, but you can’t read the signs. You don’t understand — let alone speak — the language. You don’t have the currency and you certainly don’t comprehend the subtle social nuances.

Flashback to day one at Shopify, where I was getting off that same plane. For someone who always considered herself if not ahead of the tech curve then at least riding it, the last thing I expected to struggle with on my first day was the simple act of turning on my computer. I’d never used a Mac before and it killed me. The onboarding instructor barrelled forth delivering what was no doubt useful and interesting content. Meanwhile I was cursing under my breath while googling how to use the touchpad, hiding my phone under the table like a kid cheating on an exam. That, dear readers, was the bad kind of stress.

And while the tools and tech got easier in time, and I now love my Mac, the thing I struggled with most equated to none other than a writer’s identity crisis.

I’d just come off about 15 or so years of working in fairly corporate work environments when I joined Shopify to lead internal communications. And through those years there was an ongoing trend in the feedback I received about my writing style: too casual. My informal nature didn’t reflect the right tone when it came to writing for these organizations. I took business writing classes. I wrote down impressive words in meetings, taking note to use them later. I scoured the boxes on “buzzword bingo” cards looking for new material. And I learned how to write something and then go back to scatter corporatese across the paragraphs like I was throwing sprinkles on a cupcake.

Now at Shopify, immersed in a very different culture, the “too casual” comments have turned into “Can you make it less corporate?”

Who am I? If I’m too casual for traditional organizations and too corporate for Shopify, is there even a place for people like me? A shelter for writers who can’t find their tone? Can I ‘uncorporate’ my language? Is it even possible to scrape all the sprinkles off a cupcake without ruining the whole thing?

Fortunately being part of a company with the right values and a strong focus on learning has helped me begin to recover from my addiction to corporate-speak. Some examples:

We like taking risks. Risks come in all forms, so this is probably on the micro side of the spectrum, but it can feel risky to share something I’ve written where I’ve tried something new with my tone or wording. Sharing early drafts — and not overly edited polished pieces — has helped me play around with a new style. And when it doesn’t work (turns out not everyone thinks I’m as funny as I do) then I can learn where I’ve gone too far or off the rails entirely.

We thrive on change. Keeping this in mind helps me when my old-dog brain wants to revert to a mindset of, “but this is how communications is done!” Knowing I can get better by changing up what I’m doing is kind of a cool thing. Which feeds into our thoughts around having…

Strong opinions, loosely held. Lest I project a utopian vision here, there are definitely times when my opinions on a written piece are quite different than those of my peers or lead. Making room for everyone’s strong opinions to be expressed is really important…and letting go of them when a better argument or new information is shared is just as much so.

Simplicity. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Sure, there may be exceptions (my geometry skills are about as refined as my sciencey ones) but in general this is an accepted theory. The same applies to words. The quickest way to get from message to understanding is to cut the extra words and get to the point. Editing — by self, others or through the Hemingway app — has become a longer part of my writing process at Shopify, one I had lost touch with over the years.

I’ve been working on it over the last 11 months and I’m getting there. Most recently I’ve learned that to be less corporate in my writing isn’t the same as being inauthentic. So even if my peers drop clever pop-cultural references in their writing doesn’t mean I have to in order to be successful.

It does, however, mean I occasionally need to google Drake references to keep some street-cred.

(author’s note: at time of writing this post I received a Slack message giving feedback on some writing I’d done saying, “I find it sounds corporate”…always work to be done, friends, always work to be done.)