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.

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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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