Breaking English rules to please your boss

Is there a technical, insurance inside baseball reason for using the term "coverages" that us simple sports reporters wouldn't get? I have a friend who works for an insurance company. I'll ask her. It'll give me an excuse to talk to her, besides the usual one of her being really hot.

 

SF, the greatest "interminable bullshit" I have ever seen, came from a company I work for two different times:
The kick-in-the-crotch euphemism(s): "Voluntary and involuntary separation packages."
I would like to choke that fucker.

 

Ask her nicely, and maybe you'll get under the coverages with her.

 

Writing is a skill, like anything else, and the lack of writing ability in the business world shocks and appalls me on a daily basis.

My non new non-j-job (though not technically "new" after almost two years) is in auditing. I audit defaulted mortgage loan files for the mortgage insurance industry and write 10+-page reports on the various kinds of fraud I find (there is a lot). The company I work for was specifically recruiting journalists, in part, because the folks with the mortgage backgrounds they were getting could not write for shit.

My reports contain a lot of canned industry and pseudo-legal language that I've had to adapt to. Some of the conventions they want us to use in them are flat-out wrong from both a j-style and English-wonk perspective. I don't fight it except in the rare case it's brain-breakingly stupid, however. When I ask why something is the way it is, there is usually at least an explanation for it (and, yeah, I've learned to accept "this is the way the industry does it" as an explanation).

The way I figure it is this. AP Style is fucked up in several ways, but it is the way it is because it works better for journalistic writing. Similarly, niche-industry language is fucked up and non-sensical in various ways, but I try to approach it the say way I approached AP Style. It's not so much wrong as it is different, and even if the reasoning behind the differences doesn't make sense to me, I can accept that the language I'm using has a purpose other than to be perfectly pristine prose.

That said, I have brought certain things up to our editing staff when I did feel something was silly, and changes are made to our in-house stylebook for language use pretty frequently. So I think it's a good idea to point out things that seem weird.

ETA: We don't have to use the word much but, when it comes up, I get to write "coverage." I don't work specifically within the insurance industry, however, (our auditing operation is technically a third-party firm that the mortgage insurance companies contract with).

 

Blue,

What is your job title. Might be helpful for folks looking for work. It's hard to tell with all the titles out there what journalists might be qualified for.

I think most folks who can work in this business can do about anything, but the hiring managers don't always see it that way..

 

I personally like "monies".

 

They technically call me a "consultant." Auditor/report-writer probably best describes what I do, however. I'm surprised at how many of my j-skills carried over pretty painlessly. The mortgage stuff can be learned like the stuff in any industry, the math is nothing more complicated than what I did in eighth-grade. Interviewing and getting information out of difficult sources (borrowers, employers, etc.) is a key part of what they want us to do, as if stuff like Internet research and sifting through county records (I did a hitch as county government reporter back in my j-days). The ability to analyze lots of information and boil it into something coherent is the big thing that I think has helped me do well-enough at it.

I actually found the place through JournalismJobs.com, as reporters were one of the specific sectors they were recruiting from. It's a pure-commission job (I technically have no salary) which is stressful in a very different way than reporting was stressful and is still pretty demanding in terms of time, so it's not for everyone. Right now I feel lucky to have landed it, however. The company's stopped hiring but I've heard through the grapevine they might want to start adding folks again in June (anyone interested can PM me for more info about this specific company, and I'll keep an eye on J-Jobs if they angle for employees there again.)

I do think journalists tend to undersell their skills. The job is very demanding and things like the ability to write clearly, analyze information quickly, and the expectation of a certain level of ethics are actually very desired in other industries. Hiring managers don't often understand everything a reporter does, but if you can find a way to explain it to them it can be fairly impressive.

 

Corporate speak: "Everyone else in the industry does it."

Journalism speak: "That's our paper's style."

 

It might come from the way policies are cobbled together. For example, if you drive a clunker, your "coverages" could include liability and personal injury, but not collision.

 

My first day at my job I had to write about a city's "visioning" process. Don't think I didn't raise holy hell over that one. My editor said, "Well that's what they call it." I contended that just because they use it doesn't mandate that we should.

We went with visioning.

Another one that bugs me is "greening."

 

I don't see this as any different from a newspaper-specific style book.

 

I don't see what's wrong with coining words to describe what you want to say.