I agree. The linked examples of jargon in the article feel more like precise wording chosen to reflect legal or contractual obligations. Not great for casual communication, but when you start talking about people's job duties and working hours then precision is important.
Always consider your audience. If you're writing casual communications for a mixed audience, ditch the jargon and use simple words.
If you're speaking to professional peers on business matters, use the precise language. Don't unnecessarily complicate sentences or use complex words when simple words are equally effective, though.
Corporate jargon isn't supposed to make communication clearer. It's a kind of stock verbal filler used for status signalling by people who aren't articulate enough to communicate clearly.
Linguists call this register. It's linked to social status, general social context, and specific situational context.
There's even an ISO standard for different linguistic registers. Language translation systems have to worry about this, because if they get it wrong, hilarity ensues.
Am I alone in not finding many of these examples particularly hard to understand? Maybe in the context in the workplace they are easier to understand than in isolation on paper. All professions have lingo, for example, the Army has its own unique jargon. It seems like there is a trend you see in writing where the author has to exaggerate or feign the severity of a problem for dramatic effect to get the content viral. It's like how Dilbert is an exaggeration of the workplace, because it would not be funny otherwise.
Saying "touching base" does sound stupid but whatever
I think it's worth distinguishing jargon from corporate speak. "Swimming in the social-stream," for example, isn't jargon. It's cringeworthy business talk.
There's a Peter Drucker quote, I believe, that I can't manage to find, but goes something along these lines (totally paraphrasing):
Businessmen tend to use fancy jargon for mundane things, which gives more exciting and important trappings to what is, in reality, a tremendously dull job. We should let them have it -- somewhat obfuscated language is a small price to pay to let them feel a little bit better about the boring tasks they accomplish day in and day out.
The main purpose of jargon is to concisely communicate complex concepts using convenient labels - see [0]. If your workplace is using jargon merely to signal belonging to the group, then that's just sad.
Not having everyone on the team be as familiar with English, especially its idioms and figures of speech, is a great reason to avoid using them and stick to (legalistically) simplistic vocabulary. Unfortunately it also makes its usage feel cold and dry which in turn affects the company culture. There have been plenty of times I wanted to use a phrase that was perfect for the situation at hand and all its connotations would have helped provide lots of context “for free” in the discussion, but couldn’t because I wasn’t sure if certain people on the team would understand due to past misunderstandings among the team.
These are not common enough words to lean into. Corporate speak will just incorporate them into the new normal and we're going to have to pivot to something else. How about we streamline to just basic english words that encourage open communication?
From my experience in the corporate world as well as the small business world, the business people who use more jargon and buzz words (out of place) are usually compensating.
Agree 100%. Whether a job description, Web page, brochure or any other vehicle, real communications say what they mean and don't use euphemisms. These generic descriptions are probably copied and that's pure laziness.
Its mostly not. Jargon is specialized use of terms used to facilitate clear communication of ideas within a specific community/domain. Management speak -- at least the form that is often mocked -- is just using flowery language to conceal the absence of substance, and is pretty much the opposite of jargon.
Jargon are just words, abstractions. I mean, even the term HR is considered a jargon term if you aren’t familiar with the concept.
Nadella isn’t speaking to you, but to a bunch of shareholders, his messaging is extremely optimized for that target audience (I learned this when working for MS). Likewise, Jobs was talking to you, his messaging was similarly optimized to a different audience.
I think the worst problems with corporate jargon are when a company has built up a culture of misusing words, or using jargon that other organisations use, but using it differently. I can recall several occasions where sales people have tried to correct me (trained accountant) over the use of the terms 'margin' and 'gross profit', one insisting gp must be a %, for instance, because his team worked with sales and %gp margin.
If you aren't aware, the word "jargon" is the term for industry-specific language. It will organically evolve in any industry for a reason but it can be used intentionally or unintentionally to condescend to others outside that industry.
Yes, in the past week I've had two unclear emails from lower level staff. The second one I picked up on the error quickly, the first had me chasing my tail for a while. Words have meanings, and learning to use industry jargon correctly is important.
The op-ed (or the author) is right, that when this kind of language is used for big corporate broadcasts it always comes off as slimy, fake, long, inefficient fluff filled around sinister double-speak.
And it also got right that when workers hide behind this language others (and the work too) usually suffer.
Of course there never is "all general business speak". Every big company has a local lingo full of bullshit, acronyms, abbreviations, phrases and so on. HR, legal, CSR, marketing and sales - so basically pieces of broadcast style communication has a lot of similarity in them, but .. that's it.
This isn't about "jargon" being used to "be polite". "Jargon" is specialized terminology which may not be understood outside of a group or context. "We took an existing encoder-decoder transformer model from huggingface and slapped a token-level classifier head on it" is lot of jargon. By contrast, everyone understands what "let go" means.
The reason for choosing to say "let go" vs "terminated" isn't to "be polite". More broadly, in this and similar announcements, we see framing, of active vs passive parties, to spin responsibility, agency and involvement. The tone of the whole thing is "because of the broader economic environment, this business outcome was so inevitable and our hands were so forced we will barely acknowledge that it was a decision." And as a stark contrast, they describe all of the things they're giving "impacted" former employees in the active voice: "We'll pay", "We'll accelerate", "We'll cover", "We'll be supporting" etc.
I think they actually seem to be doing a pretty good job supporting the staff they terminated. I just think if they actually want to take responsibility for their actions, both bad and good, they should talk in a way that acknowledges when they're the principal actors.
I like this idea of a "company's written language", I have known many people who are great communicators who nonetheless didn't write using the correct corporate cultural terms and were viewed as "poor communicators".
Basically this boils down to how strictly you cling to new buzzwords.
Always consider your audience. If you're writing casual communications for a mixed audience, ditch the jargon and use simple words.
If you're speaking to professional peers on business matters, use the precise language. Don't unnecessarily complicate sentences or use complex words when simple words are equally effective, though.
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