Modifiers are “the great deceivers,” according to The Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing. “They give the illusion of specific meaning without its substance.”

How do you know whether a modifier delivers substance or illusion? Try the picture test. Picture:

A kitten
A black kitten
An 8-week-old black Persian

The picture in your mind changes with each new piece of information. That means modifiers like “8-week-old” and “black” add concrete detail.

That’s substance.

If not, it adds bulk without substance.

Now, picture that 8-week-old black Persian again. This time, let’s add one more word:

Cute 8-week-old black Persian

Does the picture change? No. That’s because “cute” doesn’t add meaning to the phrase “8-week-old black Persian.”

It’s a great deceiver.

Lose the modifiers that add bulk without content. Write in specific nouns and verbs instead.

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Source: Ann Wylie, Cut Through the Clutter, Wylie Communications Inc., 2005

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When Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about climate change for The New Yorker, she had to define terms like spectroradiometer and albedo. Read how elegantly she describes them:

I love learning the Latin ancestry of albedo and hearing the word albino in it!

Overcoming jargon isn’t just for audience members with a high school education. Note that even highly educated readers like New Yorker subscribers need to have terms described.

Here’s how to avoid jargon and other special terms and technical terms when writing to the general public and business-to-business or other audiences:

1. Define the term before using it.

New York Daily News editorial writers Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans earned a Pulitzer for their series on the declining health of 9/11 rescue workers.

In doing so, they came across unfamiliar medical jargon like interstitial lung disease. But before the writers even introduce that term, they describe how the disease works:

“Actually, DeBiase was on the verge of death. Inch by inch, his lungs were turning into scar tissue, slowly losing the ability to infuse his blood with oxygen and to cleanse it of carbon dioxide.”

2. Write about jargon.

Sometimes the best thing to do with jargon is to acknowledge it and make fun of it. That’s what the Daily News writers did in this passage from their Pulitzer-winning series:

I love the line “take a deep, deep breath.” In fact, I’m hoping to run into some jargon in my next article so I can steal it.

3. Use concrete examples.

So you think your subject is complex? Try taking on nanotechnology.

That’s the subject of “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics,” a classic speech by Richard Feynman, one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century.

One of his techniques is to explain concepts using concrete examples from the audience’s own world: “Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?” Feynman asks.

4. Use familiar words.

Of the nearly 7,000 words in Feynman’s talk, my spell-checker tripped over only a handful. Most were people’s names. The others: demagnify, carotenoids and microsome. That’s .04 percent of the total number of words.

So use the words in your reader’s head, not the words in your head.

That will help with SEO as well as reader understanding.

“The very fact that a word is unexciting indicates that it’s frequently used,” writes usability guru Jakob Nielsen. “Often, a boring keyword is a known keyword.”

5. Use short words.

Feynman’s words averaged 4.4 characters each. Again: The topic is nanotechnology! How does your piece on the United Way fund drive or the CEO’s vision for the new year stack up?

6. Make reading easy.

Feynman’s piece weighs in at the 9th grade level according to the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index. And it scores an amazing 62.5 percent on Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease index.

That makes Feynman’s piece is much easier to read than virtually all of the business communications I review.

7. Use the words in your readers’ heads.

Overcoming jargon will help you get readers to your content — and keep them there.

Use generics: If prospects know their problem, but not the name of your solution, what words will they likely search for? Use those terms as well as your product and service names.

After all, asks Barbara Krause, vice president of corporate communications at Krause Taylor & Associates, how many people would look for custom designed sports footware when running shoes would suffice?

Bottom line …

How to overcome jargon? Use the words in your readers’ heads, not the words in your head.

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Sources: Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans, “Save Lives with a $150 Lung Exam,” New York Daily News, Aug. 7, 2006

Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans, “Enough Studies: We Need Action,” New York Daily News, Sept. 6, 2006

Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Climate of Man I” and “The Climate of Man II,” The New Yorker, April 25 and May 2, 2005

Jakob Nielsen, ‘Use Old Words When Writing for Findability,” Alertbox, Aug. 28, 2006

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There may be a link between jargon and poor business performance, according to a study by Deloitte Consulting. In one test, SEC documents got more and more obscure as the organizations got deeper and deeper into trouble.

“We think that’s a good indicator of the linkage between clear and straight communications and business performance, including the issue of transparency and trust,” Deloitte Consulting partner Brian Fugere told Reuters.

No wonder The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others have begun reporting readability of SEC documents in the financial pages. And the Chicago Sun-Times recently quoted this internal Chevron memo:

Reporter Zay N. Smith’s response:

“Sell your Chevron stock. Sell it now.”

But jargon doesn’t just suggest that your company may be in trouble. It also makes you look less intelligent.

Demonstrates your ignorance.

Using stuffy words might make you sound stuffy. But it won’t make you sound smarter. In fact, people who use big words when smaller ones will do actually sound less intelligent, according to research at Princeton University.

“While intelligent people can often simplify the complex, a fool is more likely to complicate the simple.”

— Henry David Thoreau, American author and philosopher

In one experiment, a group of bright Princeton undergrads read the original translation of Descarte’s Meditation; another group read a simplified version. Participants who read the simplified version rated the author more intelligent than those reading the original version.

Why?

When people don’t understand information, they tend to go more with the original, often too-technical and undigested information from a primary source, says Joseph M. Williams in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

“As a novice in a field reads its professional prose, he will predictably try to imitate those features of style that seem most prominently to bespeak membership, professional authority. … Simultaneously, if a writer new to a field does not entirely control his ideas, his own prose will often slip into a style characterized by those same clumps of abstraction.”

As no less a genius than Albert Einstein wrote: “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well.”

And keep in mind these words from Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist, who certainly learned her way around concepts that were initially foreign to her:

“If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.”

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Sources: Grant McCool, “Software to Cut the Bull from Corporate-Speak,” Reuters, June 20, 2003

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Richard Teerlink, chairman of Harley-Davidson, stands in front of a screen showing a bicep emblazoned with his company’s logo.

“We don’t call them tattoos any more,” he told his audience. Instead, he said, they are now “dermatological graphics.”

Of course you don’t, Mr. Teerlink.

Just like we don’t call it a company, talking, hiring consultants or coming up with ideas any more. Now they’re the enterprise, interfacing, utilizing change agents and ideation.

Jargon. Buzzwords. Acronyms. They’re things that make your reader go “huh?” And we need to get them out of our message.

Here are just a few ways jargon affects communication. Jargon:

1. Makes readers work harder.

When Jim Evans joined Jenny Craig as CEO, even he couldn’t understand the acronyms.

“There were too many for me to decipher, and only those who had been on board for at least a few years could understand them all,” he said.

When people can’t interpret the language of the organization:

• Employees misunderstand instructions
• Newbies have a longer learning curve
• Culturally and geographically diverse team members can’t comprehend what their colleagues are saying.

Your audience may eventually figure out what you’re saying. But isn’t it your job to translate jargon so your reader doesn’t have to?

2. Makes ideas harder to “see.”

We say “I see” to mean “I understand.” Help readers “see” your point by translating jargon into visual language.

We see a tattoo, for instance. We don’t see a “dermatalogical graphic.”

Poet William Carlos Williams counseled writers to “turn ideas into things.” Jargon turns things into a wall of words.

3. Causes buzzword backlash.

People are livid about the amount of jargon and buzzwords writers use these days.

• You’ve seen the Dilbert cartoons where the staff plays buzzword bingo against the pointy-haired boss.
• You’ve visited websites that poke fun of buzzword-packed press releases.
• You’ve heard journalists and bloggers rant against press releases that are so discombobulating that even beat reporters can’t follow them.

In this environment, it’s never been more important to translate the language of our organizations into the language of our readers.

___

Sources: “Abolish the acronyms!” Ragan Report, July 19, 2004

Annette Fuentes, “Mortgage jargon can spell disaster,” USA Today, July 18, 2007

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Why avoid jargon? Because jargon is a barrier to communication.

Jargon:

1. Makes your website harder to find and use.

When it comes to medical terms, readers don’t know what communicators are talking about, according to T. J. and Sandar Larkin.

We say “hemorrhage”; they say “bleeding.” We say “sutures”; they say “stitches.” We say “metastasize”; they say, “the cancer is spreading.”

Searchers use the “wrong” medical term 59% of the time when researching health issues on the web, according to a study by Alexa T. McCray, et al. In fact, more than three-quarters of Americans didn’t know that “hemorrhage” meant “bleeding,” according to a study by E.B. Learner, et al. More than one-third didn’t know that a fractured bone was broken.

Whether you’re in the medical, money-management or mobile home business, translate your industry’s language into your reader’s language. If you want to reach your readers with SEO, use the words in your readers’ heads, not the words in your head.

2. Reduces media coverage.

Jargon also makes it harder for the media to use your PR materials. Most Canadian journalists, for instance, believe that press releases filled with jargon frequently “get in the way” of their doing their jobs, according to a study by National Public Relations.

U.S. journalists agree, according to a study by Greentarget. Corporate spin, compound modifiers and industry jargon make it harder for them to do their jobs, they say.

But don’t take their word for it. The Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s not crazy about jargon, either. He writes:

3. Cuts back on friends, fans and followers.

Facebook users don’t like jargon and buzzwords, according to viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella. Using data from HubSpot’s Facebook Grader, Zarrella found that while the average Facebook page has 624 fans, those that use corporate buzzwords have fewer followers.

Don’t repel friends, fans and followers: Write social media postings in the language of those you wish to reach.

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Sources: “What the Media Want,” National Public Relations, 2001

Gene Weingarten, “Read It and Lacrimate,” The Washington Post, May 20, 2007

T.J. Larkin and Sandar Larkin, “Health on the Web: Finding the Right Word,” Larkin Page, #33, March 2006

Alexa T. McCray, Russell F. Loane, Allen C. Browne and Anantha K. Bangalore; “Terminology Issues in User Access to Web-based Medical Information,” Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium, 1999, p. 107-111

Timothy B. Patrick, Harpreet K. Monga, MaryEllen C. Sievert, Joan ton Hall and Daniel R. Longo; “Evaluation of Controlled Vocabulary Resources for Development of a Consumer Entry Vocabulary for Diabetes,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001

E.B. Lerner, D.V. Jehle, D.M. Janicke and R.M. Moscati; “Medical Communication: Do our Patients Understand?” American Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 18, no. 7, November 2000, p. 764-766

Qing T. Zeng and Tony Tse, “Exploring and Developing Consumer Health Vocabularies,” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan/Feb 2006, p. 24-29.

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Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne of Winnetka, Illinois, were the first researchers to statistically correlate writing traits with readability.

In 1928, they published 19 writing attributes that reduced readability. The top three centered on word familiarity:

• Number of different words ( 77% correlation)
• Median number of words that appear on a list of the most frequently used words in the English language. (-70% correlation, which means familiar words increase readability)
• Number of wordsnot occurring on that list of familiar words (67% correlation)

Since Vogel and Washburne’s research, researchers have proven in the lab — again and again — that 1) word familiarity and word length and 2) sentence complexity and length are the two strongest indicators of reading ease.

Familiar words easier to understand.

Let’s take a look at some of those studies …

1. Comprehension increased with word familiarity and ease, found Ralph Ojemann in 1934. Four vocabulary factors affected comprehension:

• Percentage of words on the familiar words list
• Percentage of words understood by 70% to 90% of school children
• Average difficulty per word
• Average difficulty of different words

2. Jargon and hard words reduce comprehension more than all other factors combined, found Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale in 1934.

The more difficult words a passage included, the harder it was to understand, they learned. They found that the top two predictors of comprehension were:

• Jargon, or number of different technical words
• Hard non-technical words

These two factors alone affected readability as much as all of the other 10 factors they reviewed combined.

3. “Vocabulary load is the most important [predictor of] difficulty,” wrote Irving Lorge in 1994. He based a readability index on just three elements, including number of hard words.

4. Hard words and sentence length alone predict comprehension with a 92% percent chance of accuracy, found Edgar Dale and Jeanne S. Chall.

In 1948, they published a readability formula measuring only words not found on a list of common words and  average number of words per sentence. That formula scores among the highest of all readability formulas.

5. You can achieve a virtually perfect reading grade level correlation by measuring just the percentage of one-syllable words and three other elements, found Edmund B. Coleman in 1965.

Coleman used cloze scores, where people fill in the blanks in a sentence, instead of multiple-choice tests for his study. Cloze scores are considered a more accurate way to measure a person’s understanding of a passage.

6. Five word characteristics affect comprehension, found G.R. Klare in his1976 analysis of 36 readability studies:

• Proportion of functional words, as opposed to “content” words. Functional words include articles like the and a; pronouns like he, him, she and her; prepositions like on, under, against and during; conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. These functional words make messages harder to understand.
• Word frequency, familiarity and length. Short, simple, recognizable words make copy easier to understand.
• Concreteness. Concrete words, like schnauzer and Pepto-Bismol, are easier to understand than abstract words, like bored and trouble.
• Association value. The easier the words are to remember, the easier the copy will be to understand.
• Nominalizations. Converting a word to a noun — like put out to output — decreases comprehension. So don’t commit verbicide.

7. Shortening and simplifying words and sentences made messages six grade levels easier to read, found Thomas Duffy and Paula Kabance in 1981. The revisions reduced the reading grade level from 11th to 5th, making the revised copy six grade levels easier to read.

Choose words to be read.

Bottom line? To make your copy easier to read and understand, choose words that are:

• Short
• Simple
• Familiar

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Sources: William H. DuBay, Unlocking Language, Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2006

DuBay, Working with Plain Language, Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2008

DuBay, Smart Language, Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2007

DuBay, The Principles of Readability, Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2004

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