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!
