Dead Broets Society: The Story Behind the Strange and Bewildering Trend That’s Eating LinkedIn

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I know you’ve seen them.

The LinkedIn posts that go like this.

One single line after another.

It starts with a surprising personal story.

An unexpected workplace anecdote.

Struggle and triumph immortalized.

In bizarre business-oriented free verse.

It’s meant to impart an inspirational lesson.

In the end, it delivers some tired cliché.

People are calling it “broetry.”

You’ve just read a broem.

Look familiar? Broetry — a term coined by Bloomberg writer Lorcan Roche Kelly and popularized by news outlets like BuzzFeed and Reuters — is everywhere on LinkedIn. And it’s making writers mad as heck.

Lorcan Roche Kelly christens the broem.

Cole Schafer, writer at Honey Copy, cuts straight to the chase. “I’m not sure where the hell it came from. But, recently on LinkedIn, I’ve noticed this phenomenon where entrepreneurs, growth-hackers, and digital marketers are posting poorly-written self-help-like ‘prose’ littered with clichés and vague blanketed statements.”

I feel you, Cole. Broetry is bad writing by every stretch of the imagination. It’s full of clichés, sweeping generalizations, unnecessary line breaks, and pseudo-profundity. As someone who cares deeply about clear and precise writing, it hurts me almost physically to read it. Yet it’s strangely effective — when I scroll past one on LinkedIn, I often find myself inadvertently clicking “see more.”

In this article, we’ll explore the phenomenon of Broetry. Where did it come from? Why is it so popular? Most importantly — how can a form of writing so objectively bad be effective? Do we owe it any credit? If so, is there anything that writers can (begrudgingly) learn from it?

Fasten your snapbacks — we’re delving into the weird world of LinkedIn broetry.

BROETRY, DECONSTRUCTED

What makes a broem, a broem? Chances are, you’ll know one when you see it (the formatting is a dead giveaway). But I think it’s helpful to have a definition to work with before we dive into our analysis.

After spending countless hours scrolling, I’ve distilled broetry to the following five key characteristics:

1. Where it’s posted
2. Hook
3. Content
4. Formatting
5. Closing line

Let’s break it down, using screenshots from real broems. (Examples have been anonymized to protect the guilty.)

1. WHERE IT’S POSTED: LINKEDIN

Nobody tweets or ‘grams quite like this.

This might be basic, but the broem is a clear LinkedIn phenomenon. While cheesy, grammatically questionable, self-help content is also rampant on other platforms, the workplace anecdote format of the broem seems unique to LinkedIn. If it is present on other social media channels, it hasn’t gained the notoriety that it has on the business networking platform.

2. HOOK: A CLICK-BAITY, ONE-SENTENCE OPENER

Is this LinkedIn or an angsty marketer’s secret diary?

A telltale broetry indicator is an intriguing premise in the opening line that the writer almost certainly won’t be able to substantiate — and usually doesn’t. In the example above, it’s “Everyone thinks they understand marketing,” which is attention-grabbing, especially if you’re a marketer with a chip on your shoulder. The problem is, it’s a sweeping generalization that simply isn’t true. Not everyone thinks they understand marketing — many people freely admit to knowing nothing about marketing. Some people do jump to conclusions about things they aren’t fully informed about, but that’s true for anything in life. (Just think of how many people have turned into armchair epidemiologists over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic). You could just as easily substitute “everyone thinks they understand design” or “everyone thinks they understand sales” and create similar emotional appeal.

3. CONTENT: AN EMOTIONALLY CHARGED, PERSONAL ANECDOTE THAT PAINTS THE SUBJECT IN AN OVERLY FLATTERING LIGHT

The substance of a broem is typically a career anecdote (or, more rarely, a personal one). It’s often a story about achieving improbable success under difficult circumstances. Broems offer a sprinkling of drama in an otherwise — let’s face it — pretty bland and boring LinkedIn feed. But where thoughtful storytellers reflect on the decisions they made and the lessons they learned, broets portray themselves as heroes who can do no wrong.

This one, in particular, sounds a bit far-fetched, especially considering how seriously universities take academic dishonesty. And even if it did happen, what’s the takeaway for the reader? It almost sounds like the writer is saying, I’m special, so university regulations don’t apply to me. Instead of offering insight, the broem becomes an outlet for the writer to humble brag about their achievements. (Side note: It’s totally okay to brag about your achievements on LinkedIn. But if you couch them in a long-winded story that’s pretending to not be a brag, it’s transparently disingenuous.)

4. FORMATTING: SHORT, SIMPLE SENTENCES WITH FREQUENT LINE BREAKS

I like to imagine someone reciting this at a coffeehouse and the audience giving them snaps.

Thanks to the odd line spacing, broetry looks like, well, poetry. The simple, sentence fragment-y format of the broem is reminiscent of the unfussy style of poets like William Carlos Williams and e. e. cummings — but devoid of the poets’ playfulness or nuance. Where those poets used simple language to evoke powerful images and allude to themes without stating them outright, in a broem, there is no deeper meaning. The content is entirely surface-level.

5. CLOSING LINE: A CLICHéD LIFE LESSON OR QUASI-INSPIRATIONAL THOUGHT FOR THE READER

It’s like ‘be the change’ for hiring managers.

Broems often read like fables for career-minded adults. And like good fables, they summarize the moral at the end of the story. Sometimes, like in the example above, this is a lesson: “Change your mindset to change the world!” Other times, it’s an inspirational question. Still other times, it’s just a repetition of the opening sentence (remember “Everyone thinks they understand marketing”?). In any case, there’s a high probability the “lesson” is not a new or enlightening insight, but an overused cliché.

While exceptions do exist, I’ve found that the majority of broems exhibit most, if not all, of these five characteristics. If it checks four or five boxes, it’s probably a broem.

Is it a broem?

• Is it posted on LinkedIn?
• Does it start with a clickbait-y, one sentence opener?
• Does it feature an emotionally-charged anecdote that portrays the subject in an overly flattering light?
• Is it formatted in short, simple sentences with frequent (and unnecessary) line breaks?
• Does it end with a clichéd life lesson or quasi-inspirational thought?

Now we have a working definition of what broetry is, but we’re left with more questions than answers. Where did this bizarre format come from? Why has it become so widely proliferated?

We’ll tackle that in the next section.

Source; Post is direct reflection of MASTERY PROJECT ISSUE #3 by fenwick dot media...

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