Jargon Is a Wall: Writing for People Outside Your Industry

Every field develops its own language, and inside the field that language is genuinely useful. When two logistics people say “LTL,” they’ve compressed a paragraph into three letters. Jargon is compression, and compression is efficiency — between people who share the codebook. The trouble starts when the words escape onto a website, because a website’s readers didn’t agree to the codebook. To them the compressed paragraph isn’t a paragraph at all. It’s noise shaped like confidence.

I want to be precise about what jargon does to an outside reader, because it’s worse than “they don’t understand it.” A reader who hits an unfamiliar term does not simply skip it and keep going with slightly less information. Something more corrosive happens. They start to suspect the page isn’t for them. Two or three such terms and the suspicion hardens into certainty: this is for insiders, I am not an insider, I should leave before I embarrass myself. Jargon doesn’t just fail to communicate. It communicates something — “you don’t belong here” — and it communicates it fluently.

The people writing the page almost never intend this. Usually the jargon is there for the opposite reason: to signal competence. If we say “omnichannel orchestration,” surely the reader will conclude we’re serious people who know the field. And with one particular reader — a fellow expert, a competitor, an industry analyst — that might even work. But websites are read mostly by non-experts with money: the operations manager who was told to find a tool, the founder buying something outside her specialty, the customer who has the problem but not the vocabulary for it. Expertise signaled in a language the buyer doesn’t speak reads not as expertise but as indifference.

There’s a hierarchy of jargon worth distinguishing, because not all of it is equally guilty. At the bottom is genuine technical vocabulary — terms with precise meanings that have no shorter equivalent. “TLS certificate” is jargon, but replacing it with “the security thing browsers check” would be a loss. This kind you keep, and you spend one clause explaining it the first time it appears. In the middle is trade shorthand: real terms, but ones the buyer may not share even if the practitioner does. This kind you translate. At the top, and most common on homepages, is decorative jargon — “synergize,” “best-of-breed,” “leverage” as a verb for everything. These terms have no precise meaning even to insiders. They aren’t compression; they’re padding wearing compression’s uniform. This kind you delete, and nothing needs to replace it, which tells you what it was contributing.

The reason decorative jargon is so hard to see from inside is that familiarity feels like meaning. If you’ve read “end-to-end solution” four hundred times, the phrase produces a small comfortable hum of recognition, and the hum is easy to mistake for comprehension. The test is to ask what the sentence would forbid. A sentence that says “we back up your data every hour” forbids something — it would be false of a company that backs up daily. A sentence that says “we deliver robust, scalable solutions” forbids nothing. No company on earth would deny it. A sentence no one could disagree with is a sentence that says nothing, however professional its vocabulary.

People sometimes object that writing plainly means dumbing things down, as if the choice were between sounding smart and being understood. This gets it exactly backward. Translating a technical idea into plain words is harder than leaving it in jargon, and the result demonstrates more understanding, not less. Anyone can repeat the incantations of their field. Explaining what the incantations mean requires actually knowing. Physicists writing for the public don’t sound dumber than physicists writing for each other; they sound like they understand it better, because plain explanation leaves no room to hide. The person hiding behind jargon is more often the one who’s shaky on the substance.

The practical fix is translation, and the best translators are your own customers. Listen to how people describe their problem before they’ve bought anything, back when they only had the pain and not the vocabulary. Nobody wakes up wanting “workforce optimization.” They wake up wanting to stop building the weekly schedule in a spreadsheet at 11pm. Write the page in the second language — the language of the problem — and keep the industry language for the spec sheet, where the experts who need it will find it.

When GazeSite grades a page for clarity and readability, unexplained insider vocabulary is one of the most common findings, and I’ve noticed the sites it flags are rarely run by careless people. They’re run by experts. That’s the trap: the deeper your expertise, the more of your vocabulary has silently crossed over from “specialist term” to “word I assume everyone knows.” You can’t feel the crossing happen. So test from outside. Show the page to someone in a different industry and ask them to circle every word they couldn’t define. The circles will surprise you. Each one is a brick in a wall you didn’t know you were building, between your product and the people trying to reach it.