From the course: Writing in Plain English

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Avoid technobabble and legalese when writing in plain English

Avoid technobabble and legalese when writing in plain English

From the course: Writing in Plain English

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Avoid technobabble and legalese when writing in plain English

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- [Narrator] In addition to avoiding jargon, you also want to avoid two more types of language that can make your reader feel confused and excluded, technobabble and legalese. While jargon is an authentic use of specialized language that experts often use to efficiently talk to each other, technobabble is the unnecessary use of technical terms. For example, a farmer may tell another farmer, "The hybrids are growing well in the field, but the heirlooms have better flavor." Someone who isn't into plants may not know what hybrids and heirlooms are, and those words could be considered jargon if you're writing for a general audience, but between two farmers, that's a clear plain language sentence, but this is a technobabble way of saying the same thing. "The hybrid cultivars are manifesting pronounced vegetative robustness within the agronomic environment; notwithstanding, the heirloom specimens offer superior gustatory satisfaction." Ugh, that's almost incomprehensible and actually seems…

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