I’m passionately passionate about disliking the word “passionate”

The other day, a friend asked me to proofread their covering letter for a job they were going for. And before you go all Stephen Fry on me and ask who the hell I am to proofread other people’s work when I end a sentence with a preposition, there is nothing wrong with it…in a blog. It’s all about context. You might as well say all sentences need a verb. Far from it.

And starting a sentence with “and” is also fine if it helps make a point. One-sentence paragraphs? I must be mental, right? Nope. That’s fine too. The advertising world does it all the time.

It’s called impact.

So when my people ask me to proofread documents, letters or even CVs for them, I naturally use a different approach for all of them. I mean, duh – that’s what copywriters do, day in, day out. They adapt language to suit the client, suit the brief and, ultimately, to suit the audience.

I digress. So my friend asked me to proofread a covering letter. I didn’t even make it past the first sentence before turning to him and saying, “Seriously?” In fact, I didn’t even get past the first four words. Because those first four words were:

“I am a passionate…”

Call me cynical, but I would bet that 90% of people who claim they are passionate about anything to do with work are either slightly boring or a bit weird in a trousers-too-high and Tesco-bag-for-a-briefcase sort of way. Yes, there might be the odd person who says, “I love my job” – there’ll be people on here in the comments section dying to prove me wrong (probably self-employed people) – but I submit that if I said to them, “What would you prefer? To carry on working as you are for another 20 years or receive the same money to NOT do that and just be at home with your family or loll about playing Xbox or watching endless DVDs and reading books or go for nice, long walks,” most people would take the latter.

If you think you’re one of the others, well done you.

So when people say they’re “passionate” about auditing, I say to them: no, you weirdo, you’re not. Find another adjective. You’re just trying to pad out a half-hearted cover letter by trotting out meaningless guff that you think a hiring manager wants to hear. In fact, don’t use that sort of sentence at all. In the same way that “being a bit of a perfectionist” is the most achingly tossy way to answer the question, “Do you have any faults”, being “passionate” about something in a covering letter sounds about as unconvincing as Frankie Boyle asking with wrinkled brow how your mother is after her hysterectomy. And meaning it.

Of course, I am not the only person in the history of the English language that despises the chucking around of the word “passionate”. If there is one man I bow to for his mastery of intelligent banterisation (which isn’t a real word but should be) and linguistic acrobatics, it’s David Mitchell. In one of his spectacularly incisive Soapbox rants, he perfectly deconstructs his own hatred of the word.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bow to the master…

by Ashley Morrison

Ashley is a copywriter, editor and blogger

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