All you need to know about jargon and study charts

A lot of people these days use daft buzzwords and jargon in writing and speech. Much of it is meaningless and should be avoided at all costs, writes Alex Meehan.

Got a good idea? Maybe you should engage in some ‘blue sky thinking’ then ‘run it up the flag pole’ to see what others think? Or perhaps you could ‘get all your ducks in row’ and if people like it, you could ‘action it, going forward.’ Or in plain English, you could have an idea, make a plan, see what others think of it, and then do it.

When it comes to jargon like the above, it’s hard to argue that it improves communication. Like all types of language, it has its place – when it’s used as a kind of shorthand, it can help communicate complicated ideas quickly and easily.

But the best writing is easy to understand, accessible to all and doesn’t require an interpreter to figure out. From that point of view, jargon has no place in good clear writing.

Nobody sets out to write badly, yet there’s a lot of jargon in the world. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand’ and therein lies the problem.

Jargon might be handy but often the people who use it most don’t pause to ask themselves ‘is this word or phrase easy to understand?’

Classic examples come from the worlds of business, politics and technology. The business world is full of jargon, annoying phrases that frequently don’t mean anything at all and just serve to make it harder to understand.

The technology sector is also one of the worst abusers of language. Take this example, taken from a real life press release issued by a tech company: ‘Leverage the interoperable functionality of your IT solution.’ What does that mean? Something to do with using a computer to do something? Who knows? Probably not even the author, who seems to have strung together buzz-words to create a sentence that is barely English.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that when people use jargon, they’re really trying to sound more impressive and knowledgeable. But nothing is as impressive as clarity and this is particularly true when it comes to the written word.

For most younger people, the place where they’re most likely to encounter jargon is on the internet, which has so much slang that it can sometimes appear to have its own language. People posting online on social media apps often abbreviate language to make it faster to type.

Grammar is often sacrificed to speed, and there’s no doubt it’s faster to type ‘OMG, that’s LOL’ then it is to type ‘Oh my God, I’m laughing out loud’. But speed isn’t always a good guide to clarity.

According to a study by Dr Nenagh Kemp, senior lecturer in psychology in the School of Medicine at the University of Tasmania, taking shortcuts like this don’t benefit the reader, only the writer. She did a study with

THE BUSINESS WORLD IS FULL OFJARGON, ANNOYING PHRASES THAT FREQUENTLY DON’T MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL

55 students who were asked to send and read out text messages written in English or in ‘textese’ the shorthand language favoured by younger people.

While the writers of the texts were able to compose them significantly faster in textese, it took nearly half the students twice as long to read the messages out loud.

So the message is clear, if you want your writing to be clear and easy to understand, avoid jargon as much as possible. If you do need to use it, make the effort to explain what you mean and why, and always ask yourself if there is a better way to express yourself.