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Yours,
Victor.

We all know the person—and maybe you are him, her, or any permutation of individuals—who is guilty of this unfortunate yet understandable sin:

Jargon. 

Here is an example of that sin.

“After the mellifluous exultance of the 24-hour cycle, their soporific condition led them to a state of imperturbable somnolence.”

Compare that to… “After their happy day had come to an end, they were so sleepy that they went to bed and would not wake even for World War III.”

Should we let you see a few more examples?

Well, here are more.

1. Academic Jargon vs Clarity

Jargon:

“The protagonist engaged in repeated cognitive recalibrations in response to persistent epistemological dissonance.”

Simple:

“He kept changing his mind because nothing made sense to him.” 

2. Legalistic or Bureaucratic Language

Jargon:

“Pursuant to the aforementioned provisions, the tenant was compelled to initiate spatial realignment.”

Simple:

“The tenant had to move out.” 

3. Philosophy Overload

Jargon:

“Her moral compass vacillated under the duress of ontological ambiguity and normative flux.”

Simple:

“She didn’t know what the right thing to do was.” 

4. Over-technical Scientific Style

Jargon:

“Upon exposure to photonic excitation, the chlorophyll-rich entity initiated autotrophic biochemical synthesis.”

Simple:

“The plant started making food when the sun came out.” 

5. Pretentious Literary Style

Jargon:

“As the vesperal hour descended, the celestial canvas darkened in chromatic gradation, eliciting ruminative melancholia.”

Simple:

“As evening came, the sky got darker, and he started to feel sad.” 

6. Economic Nonsense

Jargon:

“Aggregate demand fluctuations instigated a stochastic reallocation of capital in low-growth markets.”

Simple:

“People stopped spending, so money moved away from slow businesses.” 

Why is this a sin?

Because it makes your writing difficult to understand with very little benefit.

Just think about it — every single one of the jargon sentences could have been simplified and made easy to understand for the vast majority of people with no loss in meaning.

Now, if you’re new to writing—or perhaps you were told over and over again by your teachers that a good sentence has so-called high-quality words, and if you stuff your sentences with them you will end up with good quality writing—you might actually think that these sentences are good sentences. 

“This is what English is about,” you may declare, while writing essays filled with flowery words that a teacher, a parent, or a dictionary company told you were valuable and that would somehow turn your ordinary sentences into works of art.

Regrettably, though, that is not what it’s about.

That’s why we are here today:

To stage an intervention. 

No, your Thesaurus words do not make you look smart, and the people who are facilitating you and telling you that they do are part of the problem.

Jargon does not make you look impressive. Instead, it makes you look low status.

Well—I should caveat that.

Maybe you were really explaining something that required the words that you were using.

Perhaps somehow they were precisely chosen, and without them there would have been no possibility that you could have ever articulated the exact meaning of what was necessary.

These mere mortals should feel joyful and enlightened as a consequence of your arduous dictionary search through page after page in order to convey your grand vision unto them!!!

Well, here’s news for you: if you’re reading this, you’re probably not writing research papers. If you were, then you’d be out winning your next Nobel Prize—not being swayed by somebody who is telling you about how people write like rubbish. 

Oh, and guess what? There’s even more news for you! If you have to write every single sentence with jargon, arcane phrasings, and attempts to make people think that you are so-called smart, you are engaging in what linguistics scholars call linguistic overcompensation — A phenomenon that has been researched to the point that we now know that low-status individuals use infinitely more jargon compared to high-status individuals.

As we can see from this study of the linguistic usage of graduate students of lower-ranked universities, compared to those from higher-ranked universities, the research shows that the lower the rank of the university from which the graduate student was surveyed, the more jargon they tended to use.

On the other hand, students from higher-ranked universities tended to write more clearly, with precision, with the intention of making their meaning simple, clear—not difficult to understand. 

Now you might think to yourself that you’re not a graduate student.

Well, many of you reading this one day will be—and perhaps by then you will remember what I said, assuming, of course, you don’t internalize it completely here and now, where you sit or stand reading every single word. 

I’m happy to inform you that every word is relevant for you at the moment as well regardless of your stage in life.

I don’t care if you are a king, a prime minister, a politician, an academic, a high schooler, or a kindergartner.

When you write, please don’t use jargon unless you have no alternatives, and think hard and carefully before you even consider using it.

Please don’t try to act like you are a world-shaking genius and therefore pretend to do what you think world-shaking geniuses do, because while you don’t realise it at the moment, there’s a very clear, sharp, and unmistakable distinction between what you think the geniuses of our era do and what you are actually doing. 

Every single thesaurus-reference word that you breathe out of your mouth or write in an essay adds to complexity—and also to the probability of your mistakes. Many, after all, are the people who write but don’t really understand what they are saying because they want to use hard words after hard words with no regard for what they are actually saying.

Look closely at what people who write like this are trying to communicate, and I can guarantee you that 99 times out of 100, you will not understand their meaning—and the message will not have come across. 

My writing advice for you is this: do not be like that.

Focus on the meaning of what you are trying to communicate. Ask yourself how you can most efficiently deliver that meaning with the words that you have. And ask yourself whether you can simplify what is being said—choosing fewer words, choosing only those that showcase the logic.

If it seems like you are “dumbing down” what you are writing, you are entirely entitled to feel that way.

After all, the more simple words you use, the more “kindergarten-ish” you must surely be speaking? Correct?

To that I say: Nice try, but the answer is no.

What you think is valuable need not match up with your intuitions of what you think is valuable to the audience, and according to my experience of coaching students and having them score A*s and 9.0s for writing in the IELTS, your intuition in this case does not match up with reality.

Of course, you need not trust my experience if you prefer not to — there is after all no guarantee that what was said here today provides an accurate description of truth or how the world works. So you will have to evaluate that as well. But I submit this to you: to think about clear, simple, and easy-to-understand language is a rarity in our modern world. But it is also a gift to humanity.

Because at the end of the day, we want our writing to reach the greatest number of people that it can—so that the largest number of people possible can understand and take action in relation to what we say and what we do not say. 

If it makes you feel better—or appeals more strongly to your sense of fairness—doing this well is far from trivial.

Rather, it is a difficult task because simplicity does not come from the mere casting down of words onto paper. It is something that must be thought about, arranged, articulated, and engineered with precision—word by word—in terms of how every single contribution opens up the mind to images, ideas, and to logic and argumentation.

If you felt that this was valuable, make sure to share this, and to put it into practice in your own writing. I look forward to seeing you in the next ones ahead!

Hello friends, it’s been a minute. I hope you’re all doing well. Today I want to talk about a little often unnoticed aspect of writing: meaning. I think it’s not controversial for people to realize that words mean things. It seems a fact that’s as obvious as the reality that water is wet, humans breathe air, and that if you are bad at English, then you will probably not do well in the first language English exams. But I digress.

Words mean things.

And that’s especially important for people to realize, especially when they’re just learning how to write, to articulate their thoughts, and they just don’t know why they are getting things marked down.

The reason I decided to talk about this was that a student of mine recently had an essay come back whereby she was complaining about the grade that she had received, and the multiple comments on her essay that the teacher had given, asking her questions about grammar and otherwise. One of her sentences was: “Driving to the cave, he did some research on his destination,” to which the teacher responded with a snarky, “Doing research while driving?”

Now, the student might very well just read that feedback, nod their head, and then go on, assuming that this is just one of many mistakes that they need to be aware of. But I wonder if they have actually learned the lesson. So, I’m here to make it plain. The reason that they ended up getting points docked and that comment in the first place was that the sentence itself was not logical.

Now, you could argue that, well, the student didn’t know the grammar. Maybe they were weak. Maybe they just weren’t very aware of how to actually put the words in the right place. Why should the world be so cruel to them? Why should they be penalized?

Well, to that I say, at the end of the day, remember, there is a specific meaning to things.

If I told you that water was dry, would I not be telling you a lie? If I tell you that surely all boys are taller than girls, would that not also be a lie considering that you can understand the meaning of that sentence and then cross reference it against reality?

English is for the purpose of communicating. It’s not anything different from that. It’s about being able to articulate your ideas, a reality, what you see, think, and feel about the world.

Every single thing that you write in English has a specific meaning, regardless of whether you’re aware of that meaning or not. And that meaning comes along from the grammar of the sentence, the context of what you’re saying, and the content that you choose to share, all of which are part of the meaning.

When I look at that little example there, I can see a couple of ways that maybe the student could have actually avoided that problem. And the first immediate way is to literally just sit down and re-read what they wrote. Think about what they actually mean when they are writing. Consider for a brief while what came out of their pen.

It is too easy, in many cases, for people to just casually write down a bunch of words, thinking to themselves that they can use a structure, a pre-baked set of words, some phrases that they memorized and want to make use of to show off their vocabulary, erudition, the beauty of the language that they can bring to bear in constructing sentences, paragraphs, and entire essays.

Well, clap clap clap, my dear students. Unfortunately, that’s not going to work. At the end of the day, you have to think about meaning. What does each individual sentence actually mean? How does it relate to the other sentences? How do they come together to construct the overall point that you are going to make?

These are things that you definitely do need to think about, even if somehow or another you’ve been thinking about things like the PEEL method or otherwise as a way of organizing things. For that matter, let’s talk about the PEEL method for a quick bit.

The reason that we teachers suggest in many cases that you use the P-E-E-L method is not necessarily that it is always the best way of writing. There are some people who take artistic liberties or otherwise, and of course there are many different types of writing beyond argumentative or informational writing. But I use this example just to prove a simple point.

When you start with a point, you proceed with an example, explain the example, and link it to the overall essay prompt that you’re trying to respond to, you are actually engaging the way that other people construct meaning, and trying to create things in the most efficient possible way. By telling someone a piece of information that they didn’t know before, giving them an example of where it applies, providing a valuable elaboration on how that relates to your point, and then linking it to the entire idea of what you’re trying to say.

Now that’s a very valuable meaning-making exercise, of course, but it’s only one of them, and it is a subset of all that there is.

At the end of the day, merely because you have a hammer, that doesn’t mean that everything is a nail. You cannot use the P-E-E-L method for everything. At the end of the day, you need to look at the individual prompt that you have to respond to, and then you have to understand what it entails—meaning what you have to do—and then from there begin to formulate a plan for responding. From there, then you decide which kinds of meanings it is that you want to construct.

Although of course, that’s going to be hard if you can’t understand the specific meanings of the sentences around you, that you hear, the ones that you write, the way that sentences relate to one another, and how all of those things come together to create a piece of communication, both the ones that you write and also the ones that you read.

Now, if that seems like an overload of information for you…Please don’t worry.

If you learn nothing else, then let it be this: every single thing that you read means something, and every single thing that you write means something.

Check to see if it is the correct meaning. Ask yourself, if this is the correct meaning, then what does that mean about the next piece of information? Are these things ordered in the right way? Should I express things another way? Is the original fine? Can I make it shorter?

All of these little tweaks and additions out there add different things into the overall picture of meaning which you construct through language.

Now, make that picture a beautiful one, even as you learn to appreciate that art yourself in all its dimensions.