We love it when we are joined in the fight against jargon and corporate speak.
Regular readers of this blog will know we are determined to stop the spread of this vocabulary virus and we preach the importance of using everyday language in all our media training and presentation courses.
So we were delighted to read how news outlet Quartz highlighted the jargon which existed in the supposedly ‘jargon free’ memo Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote to his staff about job losses.
It showed just how easy it is to fall into the corporate speak trap even when you set out, as Mr Dorsey suggested he would, to ‘give it to you straight’.
Whether you are taking part in interviews, delivering presentations, networking or talking to your team, jargon simply has to be dropped.
If you are looking to remove it from your organisation you could do worse than start with the ‘About us’ page on your own website.
These pages often suffer from jargon and hyperbole which is seldom backed up by facts.
Why don’t we take a look at the first few paragraphs of the ‘About Us’ page of our new friends in the fight against jargon and see how we believe it could be changed for the better.
Here it is broken down with our suggested amendments:
Quartz is a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy.
‘Digital native’ may be in the Oxford Dictionary but it is jargon. What is wrong with ‘digital news outlet’? We have also checked with our wives and the word ‘born’ should not be used unless you are actually talking about birth. A company is created or founded. And do we really need ‘new global economy’? We think this first line should say: “Quartz is a digital news outlet, created in 2012, for business people.”
We publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview, built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones.
Adding the word ‘bracingly’ is completely unnecessary, and since when was a worldview not broad enough? Here we think the line should say: “We publish creative and intelligent journalism with a worldview built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones.”
Like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, Quartz embodies the era in which it is being created. The financial crisis that recently engulfed much of the world wasn’t just a cyclical decline or a correction or even a bubble bursting. It was a breaking point. And its shockwaves exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business.
The first sentence here is fine. The rest is a long winded and extravagant way of saying: “The financial crisis which hit much of the world has fundamentally changed the way we all do business.”
Our coverage of this new global economy is rooted in a set of defining obsessions: core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals.
There is some great hyperbole here with ‘seismic importance’ and, despite having worked in the media for more than 30 years, we have not heard of a ‘knotty question’. What we think they are trying to say here is: “We cover the topics and questions that are important to you.
We only picked out the first few lines because we think the rest of their page is great and easy to read. If they make a few of the tweaks we have suggested the whole thing becomes engaging and understandable.
And that’s the key – jargon infuriates audiences and causes them to switch off. Talk to your website visitors as if you were meeting them face-to-face using everyday language.
Start with your About Us page and rid your organisation’s communications of jargon.
Media First are media and communications training specialists with over 30 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers. Click here to find out more about our highly practical Media Skills courses and presentation training.
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