Ditch the jargon: communicating clearly through PR

Last week I presented to the Surrey Economic Partnership, focusing on digital PR and the importance of good web content. One of the key messages was that all too often online experts daze potential clients with their snake-oil knowledge using words that are meaningless to the outside ‘real life’ world. So, I was pleased to see today’s Daily Mail ‘examining’ the need for clear communication. (We love pouring over the Mail’s colourful contents: one recent headline intimated that Facebook gives you cancer which had us all in hysterics for at least ten minutes!)

But today’s article – ‘Mind your language’ – reports that the Local Government Association has produced an updated list of 200 phrases that it wants its members to stop using. Phrases such as ‘Interface’, ‘Blue sky thinking’, ‘Toolkit’ and ‘Empowerment’ are now out, with the support from the Pain English Campaign.

This perceived jargon issue is not only found in England’s councils: as the much admired BBC and Radio 4 journalist Lucy Kellaway highlighted last year, it is endemic. In any business anywhere a language, a framework of acronyms, an in-joke slang is adopted as a mantel of belonging. And this is quite natural

However, as experts in digital PR and PR, our ongoing challenge is to tell stories clearly and credibly to a business’s external audiences. So whether it’s ‘leverage’, ‘solution’, ‘end-to-end’ or ‘blue-sky-thinking’ don’t ask us to communicate using your in-jargon. People don’t understand it and nor should they.

Please let us know what your favourite jargon words or phrases are.