How to talk to non experts – Tip 11: Avoid Jargon by using common words

Hi, and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts Tips Course. This is tip number 11. Tip 11 is avoid jargon by using common words. Now, jargon is something that many people complain about, particularly in business. There are words that don't mean anything, and business users may talk about technical experts and say they use too much jargon and technical words when talking about their topic. Well, you as an expert, whether you're a business subject matter expert or a particular technical subject matter expert, a doctor or whomever, you should avoid the jargon from your expertise by using common words that anybody and everybody will understand. Now, to do this, we need to really understand what jargon is. And despite what you may hear from other places about jargon being bad or just fad words and so on, what jargon really is is it's expert slang. And everybody uses jargon. Everybody who has a job and a specialty uses jargon. Farmers have farming-based expertise language that they use with other farmers to make it easier to communicate about concepts and their work. Jargon is slang. It's shorthand. It's a shortcut that makes us doing our jobs more efficient when we're talking to other people about that expertise. The key is those other people also need to have our expertise and need to know that language. So jargon is really valuable in our jobs. Jargon is terrible when we're talking to people who are non-experts and not part of our job. So the difficult thing is, how do we know when— like, what is jargon and when not to use it? But before we get to that, if you use jargon, And if you don't do this tip, what happens? What happens if you don't avoid jargon? What happens if you don't use common words? Well, our old friend keeps coming up: confusion. If somebody was talking to you at dinner and then suddenly they started talking in a completely different language, you'd be confused. You might be able to work out what they were saying through context or things they were pointing at, but if they started throwing in foreign language words, you're going to be confused. Jargon is foreign language to people who don't know that expertise. It also leads to assumptions. So jargon can mean— jargon in one expertise can have a different meaning in a different expertise, particularly when we get to acronyms and initialisms. So people will either assume they know what it means, or they will interpret it using their own expert jargon and get it wrong. And these assumptions can waste time, cost money, cause more confusion. There's also a loss of interest. When someone starts using terms that are only meaningful to them and other experts in their field, no one else cares. It's like, why? Oh, I don't really— oh, you're just going into expert mode. Fine. I'll tune out and think about the other things that I need to do in my work or in my life. And all of this leads to negative outcomes for that conversation. When we have a conversation, whenever we're delivering information, there's an output that we want. If people are confused, making assumptions, or not interested, you're not going to get a— generally not going to get a positive outcome from that. So these are the consequences of not using common words. So how do we do it? How do you avoid using jargon? Well, the first thing is self-awareness. You have to recognize that you're talking to someone who doesn't know your language, and if you realize that, you then stand a chance of practicing. This takes time. It takes lots of conversation, lots of repetitions to practice using common language instead of using your complex technical language. It also requires that you consider perspective. We talked about this earlier in tips 1 through 3, how to assess the perspective of your audience, because when you consider other people's perspectives, you can pick words that are more likely to fit with their perspective. It takes self-awareness and practice, but you also need to consider that perspective. Now, another way to do this is to focus on impact. We've talked about efforts and outcomes multiple times. Whenever you describe something in terms of changes in effort, time, money, resource, difficulty, or in terms of the outcomes, financial outcomes, speed, compliance, safety, and so on, if you describe things in those terms, Those are everyday common words that anybody can understand, and they are not unique to your specialty. So focusing on impact is a really easy way, really significant way, to remove jargon from your language when talking to non-experts. And likewise, when you start using summaries, summaries are difficult to do when you use purely expert language. Summaries are easier. Analogies, the magic box, those other techniques I've talked about are all things that will help you remove jargon. If you do these things, you will use less expert-specific language, less jargon in your communication, and you'll use more common words. Now, a couple of examples just to really make this concrete is when we choose the words we use, don't use leverage, use use. When we don't leverage a thing, we use a thing. If you're in a technical field, you might use SQL. That doesn't necessarily mean anything to a lot of people, so use database language instead. Those are 2 common words that convey what you mean to a non-expert audience. And then scalability. Well, that's ability to grow. Scalability can be interpreted in a few different ways, so avoid the assumptions, avoid the ambiguity, and just say it's our ability to grow. Simple, common language that really helps people understand and avoids that confusion and misunderstanding. So if you are an expert talking to a non-expert, make sure that you avoid jargon by using common language.