Jargon is Killing Your Message (#1)
Why "Peanut Butter" Beats "Ground Arachis hypogaea"
Have you seen those product labels that read like a chemistry textbook?
"Ingredients: Organic legume paste derived from mechanically processed Arachis hypogaea seeds with minimally refined sodium chloride."
Would you buy this? Or would you prefer the jar that simply says: "Organic peanut butter with a touch of salt"?
There's a certain breed of writer who believes their value comes from transforming simple concepts into impenetrable prose. This obsession with complexity doesn't make you look smart. It makes your writing useless.
And let's be honest: are you sure you're not occasionally guilty of this in your own writing?
When Technical Language Backfires
Technical language exists for precision and efficiency among specialists. Used properly, it's shorthand that speeds communication. Used improperly, it creates barriers that keep people out.
A 2020 study by Shulman and colleagues, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, revealed something counterintuitive about jargon: it actively pushes people away from topics even when definitions are provided.
The researchers conducted an experiment with 650 participants who read passages about scientific topics like self-driving cars and robotic surgery. Some received jargon-heavy versions, others got plain language. Some even had hover-over definitions available for technical terms.
The findings were clear: jargon disrupts "processing fluency" – the ease with which people absorb information. Even more surprising, those who used the definition feature actually reported feeling more confused than those who didn't.
This created a chain reaction: difficulty processing content → negative self-perception ("I must not be a science person") → disengagement from the topic entirely. The effect was remarkably strong, explaining up to half the variance in engagement measures.
The takeaway? Technical language creates psychological distance that makes people feel like they don't belong in the conversation at all.
Knowledge Gatekeepers Get Called Out
Sometimes jargon is unintentional.
But there's another, darker reason complex language persists: some people use it to maintain power.
Nietzsche captured this impulse perfectly: "Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity."
The famous bar scene in "Good Will Hunting" provides one of cinema's most visceral takedowns of this behavior. A Harvard graduate student tries to impress women by deploying specialized academic language about "economic modalities" and "pre-capitalist agrarian systems."
Will Hunting dismantles the student's pretensions by revealing he's merely regurgitating ideas from various historians without having developed any original thoughts. When the student tries to counter, Will identifies the exact book and page number where the student found the argument.
Will delivers the crushing observation: "You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."
This scene brilliantly illustrates the difference between knowledge acquisition and understanding. The graduate student has mastered academic language—but not actual understanding. His jargon becomes a shield, not a tool – a way to signal membership in an exclusive intellectual club rather than communicate meaningful ideas.
When Technical Terms Make Sense
This doesn't mean all specialized language is bad. Technical terminology has its place when:
Your audience already shares the vocabulary
The term provides genuine precision
You define unfamiliar terms clearly before using them
The specialized language actually saves time or space
The composer Igor Stravinsky didn't tell his orchestra to "play quickly and with energy." He wrote Allegro con brio because it communicated both tempo and character in three words that any trained musician would understand.
A Master Class in Explaining the Complex
Richard Linklater's film "Waking Life" contains a scene that demonstrates the power of making complex ideas accessible. A philosophy professor tackles one of humanity's most enduring questions: the problem of free will.
What's remarkable isn't just what he says but how he says it. He begins with historical context—"This problem has been around since before Aristotle"—then builds a bridge to our contemporary understanding.
Rather than hiding behind academic jargon, he makes the abstract concrete: "We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water." He describes neural activity and muscle movement in terms anyone can visualize. When introducing quantum mechanics, he focuses on conceptual implications rather than equations: "Should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system?"
The professor demonstrates true mastery by translating a fundamental philosophical dilemma into language that engages rather than excludes. He respects his audience's intelligence without assuming specialized knowledge.
This is precisely what great technical writing should do: make the complex accessible without draining it of substance.
Your Communication Toolkit
Think of clarity as a tool to be mastered, not a constraint to be overcome. Modern AI tools are your allies in this mission, helping to identify when you've slipped into unnecessary complexity:
Use AI tools to flag jargon that might confuse non-specialists — then decide what actually needs to be there
Request a "translation" of your most technical paragraphs and compare them to your original
Ask "Can this be said more simply without losing precision?"
But technology can only flag potential issues — the real work comes from you:
✅ Write your first draft however it comes out
✅ Ask yourself: "What am I really trying to say here?"
✅ Rewrite using the simplest terms that preserve your meaning
✅ Test your explanation on someone outside your field
✅ Revise until they can understand and apply the information
Bottom Line
You could easily write: "We make organic peanut butter."
The hallmark of good technical writing isn't complexity but clarity — the ability to distill information to its essential form without losing substance.
Be the person who can make complexity simple without making it simplistic.
Be the translator who bridges worlds.
Be the writer people actually want to read.