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We Have Impact!

By Peter Lloyd

As a writer for professionals, I come across some pitiful attempts at verbal expression. Too many to list, but I’m not complaining. I can’t believe I get paid to make tone-deaf prose sing, because I love the creative challenge of finding ways to make the nearly unintelligible clear and concise.

I think of myself as a verbal oncologist. A specialist who removes parasitic words that invade paragraphs, attach themselves to otherwise healthy sentences, and eventually choke off any chance of viable communication.

Some patients present me with no-brainers. I read, “If true success is to be realized…” and rewrite, “If you want to succeed…” Done.

Another client explains, “Well, we want to promise prospective customers that our customized solutions will have a positive impact on their bottom line.”

“You mean you promise profit?”

I should wear a lab coat. Maybe then fewer patients would question my decisions, and I would finally succeed in removing from the language an abnormal growth that is currently metastasizing faster than I can cut and stitch. Yes, I’m talking about the use of impact as a verb.

The English language evolves toward brevity. Without realizing it, users find creative ways to speak and write more efficiently. Give the population a new platform, like texting, and instantly they invent ways to abbreviate and quicken communication, if only to save their thumbs.

Even before electronic media, words we used most often got shorter, as in can’t squeezed out of cannot. An innovation a dwindling few pedants still abhor.

Some time ago, to the consternation of many, contact came into use as a verb. There followed a whole lot of fuss over nothing, because using contact rather than get in touch with, in my opinion, offers efficiency. The new verb covers a list of more descriptive noun-verbs: email, phone, text, IM, fax, snail mail, tweet, and hollering across the room.

To the contrary, impact is a six-letter noun some folks use in place of a perfectly adequate and less troublesome six-letter verb—affect. The replacement reeks of laziness. I suspect that lazy writers, who haven’t quite grasped the difference between affect and effect, have settled for the uncreative solution of substituting the I-word.

Even if that is not the case, impact as a verb introduces other problems. Like most words, it carries connotations. All of which, in the case of the I-word, cloud or confuse rather than clarify. Impact smacks of overkill when you want to express a simple or neutral effect, as in, “How will this impact sales?” The word implies clobbering or what happens when a tooth can’t find its way out. Impact happens when a crater meets a planet.

Change cannot be called innovation if it makes matters worse. Impact makes a lousy verb, because connotations matter. Please help end the scourge of the I-word! Unless you really mean to suggest an effect that just might destroy the planet, stick to affect.

Songwriter, author, ghostwriter, copywriter, and content provider Peter Lloyd syndicates Right Brain Workouts and blogs for businesses including CoachQuest.

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