Shaun Kelly makes good points at Shoap’s STS Blog.
I’d go a bit further. You’re doing a terrible disservice to an expert audience if you abandon jargon and weigh down your writing with “clear and simple” explanations of every term a layperson wouldn’t understand.
April 29, 2008 at 1:05 pm
This is a really interesting topic to me, because of some pretty unique circumstances at my work. Our product wasn’t selling at all, and things were looking pretty grim last summer, when one of the engineers discovered that it could be used for an entirely different purpose, hopefully one which has a better value proposition. As a result, I’ve had to swap out an entire set of jargon for another, since our target audience, purpose, and even method of use are different. We spend a lot of time talking about what our audience would or would not understand, and we’re continuously being told by prospects that various words we are using are the wrong ones. Unfortunately, my boss doesn’t want me to gather data from prospects/customers, so I’m mostly having to guess and then react to feedback.
May 5, 2008 at 9:05 am
I’m left in the dark too from time to time, when for one reason or another, my client doesn’t want to ask customers (or bother SMEs). I do what you do: guess.
I also head for the Google, as I’m sure you do. I try to make it binary: is one word better than another? Google each and you often have the answer right away.