Use Jargon to Exclude More People
Jargon is like having invasive weeds in your word garden. If you give up pulling the invaders, readers will give up strolling through your writing.
What is it?
Jargon usually refers to words that are used exclusively within a profession. Everyone’s heard of legal jargon (legalese), for example, infamous for excluding most of us from understanding what’s really happening in the lawyerly world.
Medical jargon is another one. A good medical professional knows to use everyday words with patients to put them at ease. A bad one can leave people wondering if they’ve got a harmless mole or skin cancer.
In the world of high-tech business, where I live, jargon can sometimes run rampant. A great number of people pursue careers in high tech, so it’s not unusual for me to be in meetings with people who are new. And who feel left out because they’re too fresh to have learned the jargon.
What does it look like?
Try this: Before you tee up this greenfield game changer, double click this BHAG because it’s in your wheelhouse. Unpack it for the silos without solutioning, that’s the ask. If they’re out of pocket, put a pin in it. We need that mindshare to move the needle. When there’s bandwidth, we’ll sync up to pick the low-hanging fruit.
Know what I’m saying? If you’d like to take a guess, please add a comment. And even if you do get what I’m saying, you should be put off. This is a bad way of communicating.
(Credit to The 360 Blog for publishing a table of these offensive terms.)
But it’s not just new people. Long after I’d already been in the business, I was at meetings with someone who kept using the word “bicycling” to mean … actually, I still don’t know what they meant! I only know that they didn’t mean a form of self-powered 2-wheeled locomotion.
Why is it used?
Why do people jump on the jargon wagon instead of using plain words and insisting that others do too? It’s about belonging and appearing smart. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we, too, sound like the “experts,” we can join the in-crowd. We’ll be part of the team, a member of the tribe. Who wants to be on the outside?
Using jargon, we think we’ll sound more confident and knowledgeable, more believable (if not more intelligible), more like a leader. We’ll get respect.
But the reality is that, using jargon, we’ll just make someone else feel uncertain, even bad, and then force them to do extra work to learn. It’s wasted time, and that won’t help the business.
Here’s something that won’t shock anyone: we never use jargon when communicating with customers. That’s a rule I’ve seen in every style guide I’ve read. Customers aren’t paying us to confuse them.
Are all mysterious words jargon?
Having gone on a rampage against jargon, I also want to acknowledge the need for lingo in certain contexts.
If you’re doing scientific research on plants and need precise descriptions of leaves, for example, you need words that are as exact as numbers to get your meaning across. Is the leaf shape lanceolate or aristate? Is the leaf edge serrate or serrulate? You readers need to know exactly what plant you’re talking about.
While my example of jargon-filled business communication is made up, I’ve heard each and every one of those words being used in meetings and seen many of them in writing. Sometimes I knew what was being said, and sometimes I didn’t. I wonder, too, how many other people in those meetings were more lost than I was. And how much easier it would be to do business if everyone stuck to plain words.
