Adding unneeded complexity and jargon ruining a piece of writing

Ecclesiastes gives us time and chance. Orwell’s parody gives us “objective consideration of contemporary phenomena” and the sudden desire to fake a fire alarm. The pompous version adds no intelligence; it buries the thought under a regional sales director’s vocabulary. Every swollen phrase forces the reader to unpack what the writer was too nervous to state plainly.

Work is infested with this stuff. A login screen reports an “authentication exception” instead of saying the password is wrong. A strategy promises to “leverage cross-functional capabilities” because “sales and marketing must plan together” would reveal an actual obligation. A proposal offers a “holistic ecosystem” where three useful features ought to be.

Jargon can be precise among people who share its definition. “Gross margin” earns its keep. “Strategic value orchestration” usually means the meeting has outrun the decision.

The trick is to locate the embarrassment. What simple claim would make the writer feel exposed? Perhaps the plan has no owner. Perhaps the product saves only ten minutes. Perhaps nobody has decided. Write that sentence first.

Plain language does not patronise intelligent readers. It stops asking them to perform unpaid excavation. Better still, it makes disagreement possible: people can challenge an idea only after they understand the bloody thing. Prose that grows more impressive as its meaning disappears has become a laundering service for uncertainty.