Writers in technical professions, such as scientists, engineers, accountants, and auditors, will warn colleagues, clients, and vendors against using ambiguous language. Precision is an apparent hallmark of business and technical writing. By definition, precise diction would exclude most interpretative language like excellent business (instead of $43 million business), remarkable recovery (instead of 16% recovery), and poor packaging (instead of 2 of 10 packages were mislabeled).
If you think critically, however, you'll notice that even the parenthetical language above is laden with subjectivity. A $43 million business is not excellent compared to Amazon if you're measuring revenue, a 16% recovery is not so remarkable if the business lost 23%, and 2 of 10 mislabeled packages do not constitute poor performance if Quality Control detected the errors before shipping.
Here's the problem for writers: Nearly all non-mathematical language (and even mathematical language in certain contexts) we hear and read is ambiguous. If you and I decide to share the cost and benefit of buying a dozen eggs for $1.60, we would each pay $0.80 and take six eggs each. Nothing ambiguous about that. But we might inconclusively argue about the "freshness" or "largeness" or the "bargain" of those eggs. You may have more money than I, so the $0.80 investment would be greater for me. And you may not like eggs, causing you to resent sharing the cost of a useless item.
Truth be told, ambiguity used judiciously is a beautiful thing. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity attests to the value of ambiguity. No short story or novel we have ever read is not rich with ambiguity. Think of how authors describe characters. A "courageous" man might look like Abraham Lincoln to you and like Denzel Washington's character in Courage Under Fire to me; a "smart" woman might sound like Nikki Haley to you and like Susan Rice to me. That's why we love fiction. It sparks our experiential imagination. It allows us to fill in the blanks, to picture what we will.
The same holds true in business writing when a nonprofit thanks you for your "generous" gift, your company awards you for "exemplary" service, and you write to a service provider about a "satisfying" experience. The trick for writers is to understand the ambiguity of language and to use it to their advantage by qualifying the meaning of their words through descriptive narrative.
