Language & Rhetoric
Nine words got the budget.
Two people pitched the same project in the same meeting. The one who could say it in nine words won, and it was not the one who understood it better.
Two people pitched work in the same funding meeting. The first talked about leveraging cross functional synergies to drive alignment on the customer journey. It went on for six minutes and was, as far as anyone could tell, about a website.
The second one said: people cannot find the pricing page, and we lose them there.
Nine words. She got the budget. She also happened to understand the problem less well than he did, which is the uncomfortable part of the story and the reason it is worth telling.
What abstraction actually signals
The intuition is that complicated language sounds expert. The evidence runs the other way: work on needlessly complex writing has fairly consistently found that authors using simpler language are rated as more intelligent, not less.
Which makes sense from the listener's side. Somebody who can explain a thing in short words has almost certainly understood it, because compression requires knowing which parts are load bearing. Somebody who can only produce the long version might have understood it, or might be reciting the shape of it.
Jargon does not read as expertise. It reads as somebody declining to be pinned down.
The real cost
It is not that people find you annoying. It is that nobody can disagree with you, and being disagreed with is how ideas get better.
Nobody can argue with driving alignment on the customer journey. There is nothing to grab. They can argue with people cannot find the pricing page, and if that is wrong somebody in the room will say so and you will find out in ninety seconds rather than after a quarter of work.
Vague language protects you from being wrong by making you unfalsifiable, which is a bad trade for anyone who would rather be right.
Come down the ladder
Every idea can be said at several levels of abstraction. At the top it is general and safe and applies to almost anything. At the bottom it is a specific thing happening to specific people.
Most bad communication is stuck near the top, usually because that is where the speaker is genuinely comfortable and where nothing can be checked. The fix is a single question, asked of your own sentence: like what?
Instead of
We need to improve our operational efficiency across the delivery function.
Try
Three of the last five releases slipped a week. It was the same review step every time.
The second version has the same content and can be acted on this afternoon. It can also be contradicted, which is the point.
Explaining across a gap
When you have to explain something technical to someone who does not share the vocabulary, the instinct is to start where your own understanding starts, which is the mechanism. That is the wrong end.
- Say what it does, in terms of something they already deal with.
- Then say what it is, if they still need it, which is less often than you think.
- Do not apologise for simplifying. Announcing that you are simplifying is a small way of telling the room they are getting the children's version, and people notice.
Catching it
Jargon is invisible from the inside, because to you the words carry their full meaning. You are not hearing an abstraction. You are hearing the thing.
Which is why the useful test is not listening to yourself talk. It is reading it back later, after the meaning has faded a little, and marking every noun that is not a thing you could point at. Alignment, bandwidth, capability, journey, function, piece. Then ask what each one was standing in for.
The man who lost that funding round did this to his own six minutes. He got to eleven abstractions and a single concrete noun, and the concrete noun was the website.
Common questions
- Why is jargon bad?
- It fails at the one thing language is for, which is transferring an idea. It also tends to signal insecurity rather than expertise: several studies on writing find that unnecessarily complex language makes authors seem less intelligent, not more. And it makes disagreement almost impossible, because nobody can argue with a sentence they cannot pin down.
- How do I explain something technical to a non-technical person?
- Say what it does before you say what it is, and use the shortest concrete noun available. Anchor to something they already handle. The common failure is starting from the mechanism, which is where your own understanding starts, rather than from the effect, which is where theirs has to.
- Is all jargon bad?
- No. Among people who share it, jargon is efficient and precise: a technical term can carry a paragraph in one word. It becomes a problem when it crosses into a room that does not share it, or when it is used to sound authoritative rather than to be exact. The test is whether it is saving time or buying credibility.
Reading about it is the easy half.
The Listening Fox records a real conversation and shows you whether you actually do this, or only agree with it.