Jargon feels safe. It sounds like everyone else's writing, so it seems hard to criticise. But safe and clear are not the same thing. Every buzzword you lean on is a small tax on your reader, who has to translate it back into something real before they can act on it. The fix isn't a vocabulary ban — it's asking, at each sentence, whether a specific person could picture what you mean.
Spot the tell-tale phrases
Jargon usually hides in verbs and nouns that describe nothing in particular: leverage, synergy, solutions, utilise, circle back, drive engagement. These words survive because they let a writer sound busy without committing to a claim. Compare "We leveraged our solutions to drive engagement" with "We emailed existing customers a 20% discount, and 400 of them used it." The second sentence can be checked. The first can't.
Replace the abstraction with the action
A reliable trick: find the buzzword, then ask "who did what to whom?" Utilise almost always means use. Facilitate often means help or, more precisely, the actual thing you helped with. Robust solution is usually a person fixing a specific problem in a specific way — name the person and the fix.
- Weak: "This tool empowers users to optimise their workflow."
- Strong: "This tool sorts your tasks by deadline automatically."
Know when technical language earns its place
Not all specialist terms are jargon. If your reader is a fellow engineer and "latency" is the precise, shared word for the concept, use it — inventing a folksy substitute would be the real obfuscation. Jargon becomes a problem when it's used to sound impressive to a general reader rather than to communicate with a specialist one. Ask who's actually reading before you decide.
The next time a sentence feels vague but polished, read it aloud and ask what a five-year-old — or a busy colleague with no context — would picture. If the answer is "nothing," replace the buzzword with the plain verb underneath it. Clarity reads as confidence; jargon reads as cover.
For the particular difficulties of financial writing, see Writing about money without confusing your reader
