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Writing in jargon and not thinking about your audience = you're fired!

Did you see the second last episode of 'The Apprentice'? The one where Sir Alan Sugar's scary business associates interviewed the final five candidates?

Three of them were fired at the end of the show, and James McQuillan, a commercial manager at a telecoms company, went first. Why? Well, apart from spouting TV gold like "I bring ignorance to the table", his CV was full of jargon.

"It's all jibberish to me," growled interviewer Claude Littner. "How does an ordinary employer who's not in the telecoms industry know what rate busting NGN is? Your whole CV is full of rubbish."

Jargon is the enemy

Jargon is the enemy of anyone or any organisation trying to promote themselves. In James' case it got him fired; in the case of charity publications, it'll make people lose interest fast.

Who's going to bother reading publications filled with sentences like "Our CFR programme provides high-quality learning environments, which are a precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process"?

"Well equipped classrooms are important for children to learn. Our Classrooms for Rwanda programme provides them" is so much simpler, and so much more likely to keep people reading.

When we see jargon like this in charities' communications, we know they haven't done the most important thing when producing any publication: writing for your audience. Just like James didn't target his CV to the job he was applying for, charities with jargon filled publications aren't going to hit the spot with the public.

expert copyediting

Charities often don't realise they're writing in jargon. They use it every day in their internal communications, and reach a point where they can't get a proper perspective on what the outside world will understand and what they won't.

James was the same. His comeback when Littner threw out the jargon criticism (apart from looking like he was going to cry) was "I went through it and I'd like you to say that 90% of that CV is readable". He was wrong, and the interviewer told him so.

It's too late for poor James, but ngo.media can still help you. We hate jargon. You'll never see it in anything we write. We're experts at copyediting jargon right out of reports and other publications too. So why not give our jargon busters a call and see what we could do for you?