Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotes“Tiger, tiger, burning bright.”
Too clear.
Try: “Feline asset displaying high-luminance combustion characteristics.”
Better. Nobody can be blamed for understanding it.
Jargon is often defended as precision, which is unfair to precision. A specialist term can save ten sentences between people who know the field. Corporate sludge does the opposite: it adds syllables until responsibility disappears. We do not sack people; we optimise the workforce footprint. We do not choose; we align around a decisioning framework. Failure becomes a negative success event.
The language sounds important because ordinary verbs expose who did what. “We delayed the refund” contains an actor and an action. “Refund fulfilment experienced timeline headwinds” contains weather.
That is the attraction. Bureaucratic prose converts verbs into nouns until the responsible person disappears from the sentence. It also spreads because nobody wants to sound less sophisticated than the previous memo. One person writes “use”; the next upgrades it to “leverage”; by Friday the organisation is “operationalising strategic utilisation” and nobody can remember what was being used.
The test is brutally simple: could a bright twelve-year-old paraphrase it? If not, either the idea is genuinely difficult or the writer is hiding an embarrassingly easy one. Usually the second.
Plain English feels dangerous because it lets readers see the decision, judge it and ask who made the bloody thing.
The next draft needs three things before approval: the actor, the action and the consequence. If any one is missing, send the sentence back.