The Usefulness of Jargon and Bureaucratic Language
My students want to advance in corporate hierarchies, looking to write and speak with greater clarity. And as a default, you should often avoid to jargon, especially to reach a wide audience.
The Purposes of Jargon
But at times, you need jargon to establish credibility – your membership in the club. Take this post about a poorly written Harvard Law Review article.
I got angry thinking about a non-lawyer needing help trying to read this. If the writers hoped to educate a wide audience on tort litigation, they totally failed.
But, if they hoped to get some other academics in their narrow area to print the article and highlight some passages, they might have succeeded. Why?
- The authors used difficult language to show erudition, and in so doing, held up their prose as a mirror to their readers so that the readers would feel good about their own writing style. “If this guy writes this way, my writing must be good too.”
- The writers established good membership: those nodding at the article are on the inside. The guy scratching his head is on the outside.
Interestingly, by establishing this group membership, you establish credibility. That is rhetorical ethos: getting your audience to believe your message by establishing your believability.
An Example (Style as a Shield)
Take this God-awful writing by a university administrator (excerpted from Style, by Richard Lanham):
In the face of both the severity and continuing character of the budgetary stringencies which we thus face, we have concluded that we must undertake an immediate and thorough programmatic review and re-ordering of academic priorities—a review that would have been required in any event, although, perhaps, on a less intensive time scale. We are convinced that it is no longer possible to temporize and that action must soon be taken to assure that those elements of our program which are essential to the maintenance of a quality institution are protected and nurtured through consolidation, reduction, and elimination of those other elements which are found upon examination to be inessential or which can be rendered more economical or efficient through organizational or other changes.
The writer is basically saying that university may have to cut out non-essentials because it is losing money.
The writer could say, “We are going broke, and we will have to trim the fat.” The public would understand, but that message would land poorly among other university employees – particularly considering that many of them would be the fat to be trimmed.
In the passage, if the writer’s objective was to speak plainly and be widely understood, he completely failed. But, if he wanted to establish credibility and worth among other similarly situated employees and keep his message away from prying eyes, he might have succeeded. At times, clarity can be relative, turning on the audience and their agreed-upon conventions.
I stress style a lot, and we can find a lot of it in classical rhetoric from Rome and Greece. But there may be times when you need to keep the bureaucratic style.
Ask yourself if your workplace value clarity, or do you have to speak the jargon to be heard? If it is a mixture, I can help you judiciously choose which jargon to keep and which to toss out.
Work with me.
