By Matt Koesters

January 2025

I remember when my buddy Scott got back from Iraq.

Scott had just spent two years deployed in a warzone. He had been a mechanic on an Army base near Mosul, where he maintained armored personnel carriers, trucks, and the occasional tank. He had been completely immersed in Army life.

When Scott got back, we all wanted to hear about what life had been like for him during his deployment. But his stories were often confusing to us, as they were absolutely riddled with acronyms, abbreviations and other Army jargon. It was a firehose of alphabet soup. Military is a language unto itself, and that’s why there’s always an adjustment period when the deployment ends and civilian life resumes.

But the military is hardly the only profession that speaks its own language. Academics, medical professionals, scientists, lawyers — they all have words and terms that mean nothing outside of their own circles. Words have a way of separating the in-group from outsiders. And that’s no mistake — there’s a reason we call it a “language barrier.”

That’s why we always steer our clients away from using terms of art — words or phrases that have precise, specialized meanings within a particular field or profession — in public-facing communications. Industry terms generally only make sense to folks in that industry, after all.

It’s important to remember that even when written with the plainest language possible, not everyone is going to grasp the point of a given communication. Our lives are filled with countless distractions, and a percentage of people won’t get what you’re trying to say no matter what you do. So why make things harder on yourself (or your audience)?

What matters is minimizing the percentage of your audience that will have trouble understanding your message. And using your lingo, acronyms, abbreviations, jargon, slang, and inside baseball terms is a sure way to fail at getting through to people.

Some other tips for effective written communication:

• Consider your audience. Think about who you’re trying to reach, and then think about how they would like to be talked to.
• Keep it simple. Don’t use big words to sound smart (unless you’re writing for academics, in which case, let ‘er rip).
• Keep it short. Less is more.
• Consider your tone. If you’re delivering bad news, you’ll find that your upbeat language won’t be well-received. Reserve the cheerful language for happier things.
• Always have a second set of eyes look at your message before broadcasting it. Even the best writers make mistakes, and unforced errors are needlessly distracting.