Cleansing buzzwords from your writing
As insidious and pervasive as a fungus, jargon taints your message and repels your audience. Here are some steps for scrubbing it away.
Jargon in business writing is like mold.
It sets in while you’re looking elsewhere, and before you know it, your prose and the message you want to send to the world are thoroughly infested.
The words you use represent your business and your brand—to your customers and employees, vendors, investors, and more. The use of shopworn or technical language confuses and alienates these various audiences and should be avoided like, well, the plague.
Here are more drawbacks to the creeping, insidious blight known as business jargon:
The usual business jargon suspects
Examples of jargon in business writing abound. How many of the following examples sound familiar?
OK, I may have overdone it with these examples, but we’ve all used some of the words and phrases included here—and to what end? Because it’s easy and we assume everyone else understands what these buzzwords mean.
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