Ugh. In “4 Ways To Ace Your Next Networking Event,” Forbes—the same website that wrote a page on the economically-serious subject o’ “Twitch Plays Pokémon”—writes 1 out o’ the billion articles already polluting the internet giving success advice that doesn’t give any concrete advice @ all, as well as checking off almost every checkbox o’ lazy blog-post clichés.
From the 1st paragraph, one can see Ebokosia’s shoddy style: full o’ italics, bolds, & underlines, all o’ which scream @ the reader, treat this text as extra special! I hope this is keeping you up from the drowsiness caused by my unimaginative prose! As for the unimaginative style, it includes an arbitrary metaphor to cooking soup. See, soup has stuff in it, just like networking, & you want both o’ them to not suck, so they’re pretty much the same.
Some o’ her style choices are bewildering: “Let’s Say –It’s the middle of the week and you just received an invite to another networking event.” 1, every other word need not be italicized; it’s annoying. 2, what happened here? Was she starting to say something & then cut herself off to say something else, even though the 2 phrases are connected?
I should focus mo’ on the content, & not the style; but that’s hard, since there’s li’l content. For example, “rule 1” is simply “think ’bout what you do ’fore you do it,” but much less economical. I know the writer would probably defend this with the claim that many people don’t do this; but if that’s so, how can you expect them to do so ’nough to remember this tip? It has the same self-defeating logic as “don’t be stupid”: the essence o’ stupidity is that your cognition isn’t powerful ’nough to grasp intelligent thought. It’s the equivalent o’ telling an illiterate person to just know how to read, damn it, ’stead o’ actually going through the process o’ helping them learn; if this writer is so qualified to give advice on networking, she should actually give that advice ’stead o’ telling them to know the stuff she doesn’t bother to teach. It makes the whole article redundant.
Also, Forbes’ writers’ overuse o’ cliché slang—as if she’s hip with the kids, ’cept she’s much richer & she actually isn’t, ’cause they’re actually too linguistically competent to write or speak so sloppily—grows tiresome quickly. “So what’s the buzz?” This sentence serves no purpose but to make me waste precious nutrients regurgitating my lunch. This also includes the trite “a picture tells a thousand words” & a delineation o’ social media memes, which are truly just slightly newer clichés that require just as li’l creativity.
All right: back to content. O! Guess what rule 2 is! “Research: Be Informed”! ’Gain: know what you’re doing ’fore you do it. Readers don’t need a multi-thousand-word article to insult their intelligence so.
Also, the mo’ specific advice found within this section is rather stalkerish: look up people so you can shallowly pretend to care ’bout them when it comes time to talk with them. Later on, she’ll say you should be authentic; but then ’gain, it wouldn’t be an inane advice blog post without internal contradiction, since the prime goal o’ these is not to be logical or accurate, but to unskeptically regurgitate conventional thinking.
In fairness, her 3rd rule actually gives nonobvious concrete advice, though it’s bizarre: wear weird shit to catch people’s attention. This is intriguing from a sociological aspect, as it demonstrates the way the business world has become hippified as the hippie generation has aged, but without the good qualities & still retaining the smug superiority & authoritarianism o’ businesspeople.
This mild goodwill is squandered in her 4th rule, which is has ’nother obnoxious metaphor & mo’ words that don’t say anything mo’ meaningful than a sentence composed o’ randomized crossword answers. “Treat your business card like a credit card, give by connection not by sight.” My interpretation: don’t get any @ all, ’less you want to waste your money. Actually, in fairness, her advice not to just spew business cards @ everyone is the only useful advice in this section.
“Do the ’Tango’ with your conversations!” Ugh. Mo’ useless advice: don’t fill everyone’s time with just you speaking. That’s obvious. When people do that, it’s not a tactical decision, but a personality problem that’s much harder to rectify.
Then she cribs someone else’s work, probably to make hers look good in comparison:
1: Look at networking as a conversation
It is a conversation. What would I look @ it as? A video game?
2: Be who you are
Here’s a combination o’ unoriginality & meretriciousness—appearing meaningful but containing no meaning whatsoever—that I ’specially despise. You literally are you. That’s what the word means. Even when one pretends to be someone else, pretending to be someone else is who they are, so it’s meaningless. If that makes one shallow, well, then being shallow is who one is.
’Sides, this is contradicted many times in this article, full o’ judgments on how you should act & be: wear certain clothes, have a certain attitude & personality.
3: Don’t feel small
Like right here!
What’s that even mean? Don’t let yourself think you’re inferior to others? If you’re talking to employers, socially, you are, & pretending you’re on the same level as the person who will be telling you what to do & deciding whether you’re hired or not probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
4: It’s okay to ask for something
OK… Whatever that means. Should I have assumed it wasn’t? Perhaps it means that you shouldn’t worry ’bout looking as if you know less than everything? If it’s ’bout job-related facts, like how to create paragraphs in HTML for a web designer, you’d probably not want to ask that & reveal your incompetence in said job you’re trying to get; if it’s ’bout job-related facts, well, it’d be absurd for bosses to expect a prospective employee to already know ’bout a business’s work experience ’fore actually working there—though there is also the risk that the boss will straight-up lie, anyway.
When networking, always be yourself and confidently share who you are with others. People will be impressed with someone who is passionate, and if you stay in contact you never know where the connection may lead.
This single sentence is contradictory, for god’s sake: be yourself, but if you’re not confident, don’t be yourself & be a confident person ’stead, & if you’re not a passionate person, don’t be that person, & be someone else who is. Or are those criteria not part o’ the terribly specific “yourself” category? Can they be altered while leaving the same “yourself” intact?
This is why so many writing guides, like Stunk & White’s famous book, advise the use o’ concrete diction: it can harm writing so direly that it becomes incomprehensible, & fails @ its primary goal. Vague writing like this is not just bad, but useless. For someone authentically looking for intellectual assistance—since there’s no other assistance mere words can grant—will be left with no gain after reading this. In fact, they will lose precious time that could’ve been spent reading an article that actually said something. & that’s what this article’s primary crime is: distracting attention—including that o’ Google’s shallowly-designed search algorithm—from valuable content.
The last paragraph reiterates Ebokosia’s credit card metaphor, in case you missed its brilliance—which is likely, since most readers will likely glaze through most o’ it, if they didn’t already fall asleep.
Addendum
I will grant Ebokosia 1 form o’ praise: I didn’t see 1 irrelevant picture with some vague, meaningless caption. So perhaps Forbes has some minuscule standards?
