A Journalist Calls For Less Jargon From PR, Marketing Folks

"Scalable, holistic, end-to-end solutions."

Stephen Baker of Business Week calls on communication pros to ditch the jargon. Of course, you've heard that before. It's just so darn hard, isn't it?

Part of the problem comes because PR pros want to fit in with their clients, who all talk like that.

You win a new account ... they talk funny, you learn to talk funny. Otherwise, your client will think you're not "getting it."

Client approvals also play a part. Many people with a scientific or technical background HATE it when a PR person uses plain language.

I've had this experience many, many times:

1) Expert tells you something.

2) You write it in a way that makes sense to regular people.

3) Expert reviews writing and goes beserk because you've oversimplified something that took him/her 12 years of post-graduate education to learn.

Honestly, I've even had technical people praise the way I was able to take a complicated subject and make it easy to understand ... and still they changed everything to read like a bad episode of Star Trek.

Quick hit: I still believe our role as PR professionals is to translate the technical stuff into real, easy-to-understand language. If you've given up, I encourage you to give it another try.

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