I liked this article from The Times. Journalists never miss an opportunity to take a shot at management speak and the current crisis means that the fish aren't even wriggling at the bottom of the barrel any more.

But there's a good lesson here for business copy writers. Recently I've been working in a sector that typically lags behind when it comes to technology deployments. The copy that we wrote for the same client three years ago used sustained growth in other industries as an argument for introducing comparable systems to their sector.

These analogies won't really wash any more, so I'm going back to the numbers. The irony of the Times article is that while management jargon is forever under scrutiny, that other  business mantra: 'everything can be measured' is more relevant than ever. In other words, writers will have to be more comfortable with formulas, spreadsheets, tables and charts. Anything that weighs down the prose with the ballast of data.

Fortunately most of our writers have a good grounding in the basics. But as of today, we're all going back to school, and here's a good place to start.