Kill jargon

“I apologise for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

-Mark Twain

At the start of most workshops I run there’s a lot of jargon and garbage to get out of the way. I do this by asking:

“What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?”

The answers I get go like this:

“We need to rework what we’re doing and make it more efficient.”

“There needs to be more collaboration between teams so we can accelerate our growth.”

“We’re not trying to move product, we’re trying to change the way consumers behave.”

It’s all spew, and a necessary step to get people talking like human beings.

Magic happens when you talk plainly and strip away sounding clever.

I ask them to say it again really plainly so a 12-year old would understand it.

The answers that come back are more like this:

“Let’s try something new to make our lives easier.”

“Why don’t we team up and see if we can do more together?”

“Let’s change their minds on this.”

Jargon is lazy.

It’s what professionals fall back to when they’re unable to do the hard work to make it clearer.

If a word has more than 3 syllables, it has no business in your sales copy.

Even better if you can get the words down to 2 syllables or less.

Kill big words and make it easy reading.

There’s an online tool called Hemingway App that can tighten things up for you if you’re really stuck, but get into the habit of doing it yourself.