How to lose the jargon and write like a human being
Do you tell it like it is, or do you pursue authentic communication pathways? Are you reading this article right now, or are you leveraging online knowledge sharing?
For some people, clear and simple language comes naturally. But a horrible thing happens to many of us when we write in our professional lives. Jargon creeps in. Nouns become abstract, verbs become passive, and you can somehow produce whole paragraphs of daunting complexity that mean almost nothing. Instead of connecting with your reader, you’re alienating them.
I’ve spent the last decade editing articles written by extremely smart people in business, academia and policy, first at the World Economic Forum and now in my current role as Editor in Chief at The Content Engine. I’ve seen how hard it can be to write simply. But at a time when organisations talk to their audiences directly on social media, meaningful writing matters more than ever.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
In this article, I’ll share guidance on what jargon means, how to spot it - and how to wean yourself off the irksome habit.
What exactly is jargon?
This is a hard question to answer because it’s so subjective. Languages change all the time, and what might start out as an irritating buzzword can morph into an accepted piece of professional vocabulary. (I spent years virulently opposed to the word ecosystem unless it had something to do with wolves or mangroves, before finally accepting it as a useful metaphor for the broader context.)
And jargon words tend to share a few characteristics:
They’re opaque and hard to define
They exclude people outside your professional group
They signal that you belong to a certain clique
They didn’t exist a few years ago and now they’re everywhere
They put up a barrier to critical thought
What are some common jargon words to look out for?
There is no rule in writing that cannot be broken. These words and terms might work in certain contexts, but proceed with caution if you find yourself typing:
Leverage
Deliver (unless it’s pizza)
Solution
Actionable
Empower
In our DNA
Learnings
Build capacity
Upstream
Stakeholders
Create value
Authentic
This is hardly an exhaustive list. For more takes on jargon, check out blog posts such as this one and this one. And look out in particular for jargon words that flock together: you might get away with one or two in isolation, but readers are unlikely to forgive you if you ideate too many actionable synergies.
Why do we use jargon?
To look important. I have a rule of thumb: the more insecure the writer, the more profuse the jargon. When I edited articles that were written by executives or professors themselves, they tended to be pretty direct. When the real author was a junior team member drafting something for the boss’s approval, the result was often a bubbling soup of buzzwords.
Because everyone else does. We are social creatures who seek belonging. This might mean wearing a particular football shirt or buying a certain overpriced hand soap. Or it might mean joining in with everyone else in your industry who can’t resist empowering customer journeys while baking core values into your DNA.
Because you are trying to avoid saying something. Companies or international organisations at pains not to offend anyone tend to hide behind jargon. Evasive writing isn’t just about vocabulary, it’s also about sentence structure. Passive verbs (“value is created”) rather than active (“X does Y”) make it harder for the reader to figure out exactly what is going on.
How can we mend our ways?
One of the best guides to clear and powerful writing is George Orwell, the author who pushed a form of jargon to sinister extremes in his dystopian novel 1984. Orwell (the pen name for Eric Blair) died in 1950, long before he could pick the low-hanging fruit of today’s corporate verbiage, but his advice is timeless. These are his six rules for tight prose, taken from the essay Politics and the English Language:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I like the fact that Orwell ends with a caveat - even the most stylish writer will break a rule at some point, with good reason - but I still find this an indispensable check-list.
A few approaches I find useful date back to my journalism training at the agency Reuters, where fast, clear and accurate writing is essential, and to working in newspapers:
Imagine you’re talking to someone who is standing on the back of a bus (OK, this is a stretch - we’re talking a kind of bus specific to the UK that was phased out years ago…). The bus is moving away from where you stand, and you have to get your point across as quickly as possible before it goes. This will cut through the jargon and force you to communicate your key points concisely.
Imagine your audience is an intelligent 12 year-old. (I can think of nothing more intimidating. They will take your innovative transformation pathways and deliver you an eyeroll.)
Cut a third off your word count. Just try it.
Whichever approach you try, making the effort to cut out jargon and communicate like a human being will pay off if you’re serious about building an online audience.