The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Jargon

Nobody likes to be accused of using jargon. You write with your eagerly learned vocabulary, your intelligent shorthand standing in for months and years of hard-won knowledge, and some fool comes along and dismisses it all as jargon.

It’s true: jargon is in the eye of the beholder, and almost never in the eye of the writer. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of smuggling it in myself, in the past. But when writing for a universal readership, I do try very hard to leave it at the door.

That’s because I believe that jargon is an armoury of weapons.

In the clumsiest of hands, it’s only a danger to its user. I remember in the first weeks of my art history degree, a private school boy with floppy hair and standard issue red jeans dropping recently learned big words into his sentences in class. Chiaroscuro was one of them, contraposto probably another. The thing is, despite his exaggerated swagger, he clearly had no idea what they really meant. In his hands, art historical jargon was a big old blunderbuss, and it was literally backfiring on him. Boom.

But jargon can also be a precision weapon. During my ongoing efforts to make myself professionally irresistible (how do I look?), I have browsed the offerings of other copywriters. Pssshhw, says an arrow called copy process development. Pthwang, says another called touchpoints. Thwuddewuddewudde says a third, narrowly missing me, called brand governance. I am buckling under a hail of jargon arrows (let’s call them jargows), feeling totally inadequate without a way to defend myself.

And that brings me to the third and most commonly encountered weapon of jargon choice: the shield. Let’s face it, jargon is a great way to hide. Wrap yourself in the language of your own army, cover up the weak spots in your raw core skills, and hope that you have done enough to deflect the arrows of those scary experts who have better aim than you.

I’m sure I haven’t been immune myself. For years I wrote art reviews in a national newspaper, and I know I was guilty from time to time of reaching for readymade art clichés to make life easy, for me and for my reader, and perhaps also to give the artist I was reviewing the benefit of the doubt. But in truth, these pre-packaged phrases would do nothing more than bridge the gaps in my understanding; linguistic empty calories expanding the word count without nourishing the brain.

But if I caught myself in the act; if I realised my words were empty, or a tangle of confusion, I developed a trick that I can highly recommend. I would take my hands off the keyboard, shut my eyes, and imagine myself explaining the concept to my mother. She’s an intelligent woman, open to new ideas, but not au fait with contemporary art terminology. She’d not hesitate to pull me up if I peppered her with bullets of artspeak. In every single case, within 30 seconds, I’d have it nailed. Do you know someone like that? Try it, next time you can’t quite find the words. It’s amazing how quickly your instinct to communicate takes over.

There’s another kind of discipline that has shown me the plain English way. It was, in fact, not speaking English. I was brought up speaking Scottish Gaelic as well as English, and like many other Gaels, my level of competence is just short of professional fluency. But one of the professional bonuses (and challenges) of speaking a minority language, is that you are gold dust, even without full fluency, in a media desperate for input.

So for a while there I was writing music reviews in Gaelic for another national newspaper. The language is laden with rich musical terms I could have used, but sadly, I didn’t know them. So I had to become very creative with the basic vocabulary I had, inventing little metaphors and stories to get my points across. Like, say… comparing jargon to weaponry.

I have, as a result, laid down my arms. Join me, please, in the march for unilateral jargon disarmament. Let’s write as we speak to each other, with honesty and respect. Let’s leave the weapons at the door, and make a real connection.
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About Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

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