A great article from Bryan Garner over at Harvard Business Review on removing business jargon from your writing. As Bryan writes:
It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.
Just kidding.
Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice.
He even provides a list of words and phrases to avoid.
Maybe we should add a “Jargon Alert” to Mimiran to warn you if you’re using them in your proposals?