????杰夫·貝佐斯堅持使用完整的句子。去年11月，作家本·卡斯諾查寫道，亞馬遜（Amazon）CEO杰夫·貝佐斯不允許管理團隊在交給他的會議紀要中使用要點羅列的方式。貝佐斯的要求是在段落中正確斷句，不能一目十行地看。他的理念是，如果必須以書面形式完整地闡述你的想法，將有助于想法的完善。

????卡斯諾查指出：“貝佐斯要求團隊將句子寫全，是希望團隊成員能全面思考每個想法，從而讓這些想法更能經受住時間的考驗?！薄敦敻弧冯s志（Fortune）近日刊登了一篇貝佐斯的專訪，文中貝佐斯談到：“如果沒有想清楚，根本寫不出長達6頁、架構清晰的敘事備忘錄?！笨ㄋ怪Z查前述文章的靈感正是來源于此。

????乍一看，這一規矩有道理。但完整的句子真能解決要點羅列法的弊端，杜絕空洞堂皇的詞藻堆砌嗎？如今在商業溝通中，議論文很多時候被誤以為就是用七年級英文老師口中的“助動詞”將一堆抽象概念連起來，很多語法正確的句子都不知所云。舉例來說：

????為了提供市場最佳客戶體驗，打造與眾不同的技能組合，賦予相關機構知識、技能和內部強化，我們設立了五項至關重要的目標。

????或者是下面這封剛剛發到我郵箱的郵件。

????設計師們致力于想象和創造空間、體系、語言、工具及基礎設施，為每個人和我們這個世界提供特定的關系與傾向。

????這樣的句子主要給我們一點感覺，知道大概講的是什么事情。主旨可能顯而易見，但細細讀來你可能會想，如果用更少的字來說，少一些故作姿態呢？我用了好一會兒才意識到這些完整的句子基本上都只是改頭換面的要點列表。將所有這些詞塞入同一個句子或許有道理，或許沒有。往往很難分辨這樣一個句子的各個部分是如何聯系起來的。

????會不會問題不在于句子不完整，而在于我們用羅列法表述繁復龐大的想法時，羅列不能勝任溝通之目的？過去我們常常會羅列一些東西，這樣就不必老惦記著。（做完一件事或買好一件東西，就把它從列表中刪除，然后把這個列表也扔掉。）列表本來就是用完就扔的東西。

????現在，我們使用列表是因為我們覺得我們的想法過于復雜，用簡單的幾句話難以說清楚。《哈佛商業評論》（Harvard Business Review）撰稿人克雷格·莫科恩在最近的一篇博客中指出，現在不滿足于一個頭銜的人越來越多。這可以理解，但并不聰明，他指出：

????現實稍微有點殘酷：在任何一個特定時間，我們在其他人的腦海中只能“占據”一個位置。人們不能同時將我們認為是項目經理、教授、律師、保險經紀人、編輯和創業家等等全部。這些頭銜可能全都是真實的，但人們首先只能想到一種職業。

????給你自己6個頭銜，商務社交網站LinkedIn和SEO培訓師當然會鼓勵你通過這種方式跨界發展。但要知道，當人類(（而不是機器人）查看你的簡歷時，他們可能會很困惑。

????Jeff Bezos insists on complete sentences. In November, the writer Ben Casnocha?wrote?about how the Amazon (AMZN) CEO doesn't allow his executive team to hand him memos dotted with bullet points. Instead, Bezos demands correctly punctuated sentences that live in paragraphs and defy easy scanning. The idea is that having to spell your idea out in full will improve it.

????"By demanding his team write everything out," Casnocha remarked, "he makes them consider all aspects of an idea to make it more durable for years to come." In Fortune's?recent?profile?of Bezos, which inspired Casnocha's post, Bezos said, "There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

????At first glance, this rule is appealing. But are complete sentences really a fix for those bulleted lists that essentially clump together vaguely smart-sounding noun phrases? A lot of what passes for persuasive writing in business communication today are pile-ups of abstract concepts strung together with what our seventh-grade English teachers called "helping verbs," and plenty of grammatically correct sentences are still mystifying. For example:

????In order to accomplish a best-in-market customer experience, instill a differentiated skill-set, and bring the relevant institutional knowledge, skills, and facilitation expertise in-house, we have identified five mission-critical goals.

????Or this one, which also recently landed in my Inbox:

????Designers work to envision and create spaces, systems, languages, tools and infrastructure that afford specific kinds of relationships and predispositions towards each other and our world.

????Such sentences mainly give us a?feeling?for what they're about. The topic may be obvious, but a close reading prompts an urge to question whether it could have been said with fewer words and less grandstanding. It took me a while to realize that these complete sentences were basically gussied-up laundry lists. There may be a good reason to house all those concepts in the same sentence -- or not. It's often hard to tell how all of the sentence's parts relate to one another.

????So, what if the problem isn't incomplete sentences but the fact that we are using lists to convey big, unwieldy ideas that lists aren't capable of communicating? We used to list items so we didn't have to think about them. (Do or buy a thing, cross it off the list, then throw the list away.) Lists were disposable by design.

????Now, we use lists because we imagine our thoughts or abilities are too complex for one or two simple descriptors. In a recent?blog?post,?Harvard Business Review?contributor Greg McKeown noted an increase in the ranks of people who wouldn't pick one job title. This was understandable but not so smart, he argued:

????The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can "own" in another person's mind. People can't think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us, but people can only think of us as one thing?first.

????Give yourself six job titles -- LinkedIn and SEO trainers certainly encourage you to spread your bets that way -- but know that when humans, not robots, read your profile, they'll likely be overwhelmed.