I'm a writer professionally and so I make a pretty penny making sentences prettier. It's how I pay the bills.
Yesterday, my partner comes to me and says her company has a advertisement for the newspaper and showed me the proposed wording.
Honestly? It read like somebody ran Russian through a Japanese translator and then into English. It was, brutally speaking, illiterate and nonsensical. It was word salad with no meaning. It was borderline “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” levels of bad.
And the problem with it being illiterate is my partner works for an organization that claims to be an educational institution. So the risk here is announcing to the world in an advert that you don't understand the basics of sentence structure.
Anyway, I offered to rewrite the advert for her. About 10-20 minutes later I had a much better text that made sense and a really solid tagline that could be used in an ad campaign.
Today, I learned her bosses rejected the entire rewrite and wanted to go back to the illiterate and confusing text they originally came up with, fully of empty platitudes and meaningless words used in the wrong context.
I'm not sure why stupid people are allowed to make final decisions on issues for which they have no competency. It blows my mind and makes me feel jaded and cynical. And yet millions of bosses are, right now as we speak, making stupid decisions they're unqualified to make.