The road to hell is paved with adverbs

I've been going to Customer Success Nordics for about four years now. It's one of those events where you see the same faces, pick up a few new ones, and leave feeling like you've had a conversation that actually mattered.

This time I was the one talking.

I hosted an event at Refined and gave a presentation for the first time. I chose the topic of communication, which felt like home ground. My background is in technical writing, and I write fiction in my spare time, so it's a subject I think about a lot. Probably more than is healthy.

True to form, I took a meandering path through it.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King

That line ended up as the unofficial tagline for the whole event. It came up in the context of business communication, where adverbs tend to sneak in and make everything sound vague, flowery, and in an age of AI, a bit suspicious.

The irony of using a quote about words to sum up a talk about words was not lost on me.

The presentation pulled together a few threads I've been thinking about for a while:

• Why clear, simple language does more work than elaborate language

• How habits from fiction writing apply directly to business communication

• Why adverbs are usually a sign that something hasn't been thought through properly

It's a topic I've been circling in different contexts for years. Running support and customer success, you end up reading and writing a lot of messages. You start to notice patterns in what lands and what doesn't.

Since I've been teaching myself video editing and podcasting, I took the opportunity to record a version of the presentation at home to share more widely. The production value is firmly in the "enthusiastic amateur" category, but it felt like a good excuse to use the skills I've been picking up.

https://youtu.be/hik-VQQ8_fQ?is=gjivQ8JbCZLXx5GW