Avoiding Jargon at All Costs by Cate Mahoney Jargon. We all know it when we see it. And by that I mean we wonder what in tarnation the writer is talking about, why they made us see it, and what they want us to do with it. Jargon can be found in every field, but I know about it best in academia. Written or spoken, jargon complicates the whole point of discourse, which is to communicate, to share information. When I first entered my graduate program and was in class with people in the year above me, some of them [...]

Best Practices: Avoiding Jargon Sometimes, particularly in the business world, we hear a different brand of English. It sounds something like this: “It's time that we became uber-efficient with our integrated reciprocal consulting. I can make a window to discuss your interactive management options. Our upgraded model now offers homogenized incremental programming and knowledge-based modular innovation.” Huh? It’s hard to decipher what the sentences above are actually trying to communicate. They came, by the way, from the “gobbledygook generator.” They are made of jargon, which is proliferating at an alarming rate in the business world, the sports world, the university, and most [...]