You wrote and wanted me to publish about your BIG ANNOUNCEMENT on my blog. And I didn’t respond yet. Let me do it here, now, on my blog:
I’m not going to post about your BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.
Most of the time, I’m not going to post about your BIG ANNOUNCEMENT because it’s just not that big. It doesn’t rock my world. I don’t see how it will rock the world of my blog readers. It might be marginally interesting, but unless it fits perfectly with the focus of my blog and it makes me at least a little bit giddy, I’m not using my blog to promote it.
But in addition to your BIG ANNOUNCEMENT not being that big, it’s also often full of jargon. And I loathe jargon. Like:
- enterprise-class, software-as-a-service pre-arrival solution
- two-tier enterprise resource planning
- centralized equivalency determination information
- a world-class eco-system of innovative, on-demand, customizable capacity-building resource programs
- crowd-sourced on-demand microvolunteering
It’s bullying-by-jargon. It’s exclusionary. And in your effort to show off your jargon hipness, you are turning potential supporters AWAY.
Please, by all means, introduce the world to new words and concepts. English is a growing language. The definition of network in my beloved 1943 Webster’s Dictionary isn’t what the definition of that word is now, and that doesn’t bother me – it’s a good thing.
But why hide your BIG ANNOUNCEMENT behind jargon? Don’t write to impress me, or anyone else, with your command of the latest corporate marketing terms; write to be understood. Do that with language that welcomes me, that I can understand immediately, without having to use Wikipedia to figure out what you’re actually trying to say. Do that with language that will still be understood (and used) in five years.
If you use Microsoft Word, you may have seen the ‘Flesch reading ease’ score. Use it when you are wondering just how understandable a sentence or paragraph might be. It’s no magic formula – think of it as a rough estimate regarding how well you are writing, in terms of being understandable.
Also see this free guide: ‘How to write in plain English‘. It’s for a British audience, so the spellings won’t be quite the same as they are in the USA, but the principles are universal.