Hands Off the Bathrobe, Punk

The following tag was hanging from each of the two bathrobes in our room at the Westin:

For your comfort, we have provided an exclusive bathrobe for your use during your stay.

We inventory our robes daily and have found that the appreciation with which they have been received by our guests suggest that we make them available for purchase. Should you wish to purchase this special robe ($90), please contact Service Express.

The first sentence of the second paragraph ("We inventory...") may be one of the most tortured I have ever read. The Westin technical writing staff need to take a gander at the Cluetrain Manifesto. Specifically, these three points (numbers 3, 4, and 5 of the 95 Theses):

• Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
• Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
• People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Simply put, humans do not say things like "We inventory our robes daily and have found that the appreciation with which they have been received by our guests suggest that we make them available for purchase."

Decipher was also not very good at speaking in a human voice. I call "Decipher RPG Product Lines Transferred to Norfolk Headquarters" to the stand as evidence; it was so vague that no one could even figure out what it meant. (Are the RPG staff fired? If no, why are they being thanked? If yes, why are they being thanked? Who in Norfolk will be taking over responsibility for the RPG lines? Will the announced but overdue books be released? And so on.)

As a writer who strives for clarity and a person who believes in the straightforward, I cringe every time I read something like the bathrobe tag and Decipher press release. It is my fervent hope that I don't have to take a job where I will be forced to write such garbage, now or in the future.

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