Save this article
Use this article for free on your own website
Republish this article for free on your own website or blog. Or search or browse for more articles that your audience will appreciate. Huge choice available. Ideal for finding quality, free content. Read our publishers guide.
How To Not Appear In The Media - Use Jargon
Many a media interview has not made it to the public because it was riddled with jargon, business speak or goobledygook. This article talks about that problem.
Don’t you just love that phrase, “going forward”? Really, what other way can we go. If we could go backwards and forwards then it might make sense but, as we well know, you can only go forward in time so why use such a superfluous phrase. I’ll tell you why some people use it - because they think it makes them sound more important if they are seen to be using a new buzz phrase. But, if you want journalists to use that part of your interview, drop all jargon, business speak, acronyms or other stuffy language. Journalists, and the mass public they represent, hate that stuff with a passion.
In my country, our new leader cut short his media honeymoon period by embarking on a world tour and writing his own speeches that were laced with clichés, jargon and acronyms. In April 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Brookings Institute in Washington that: “The idea of a harmonious world depends on China being a participant in the world order and, along with others, acting in accordance with the rules of that order. Otherwise, harmony is impossible to achieve. Therefore, there is on the face of it a natural complementarity between the two philosophical approaches. And a complementarity that could be developed further in the direction of some form of conceptual synthesis.”
What? This piece dismally fails what I call my town or city square rule. Walk into any town square, stop 10 people at random and ask them what that passage meant. I don’t think even one person could explaint it. The point is that unless seven or eight of those people can understand your words, don’t use them. Use more simple words because they are not only more powerful but their use means more people will understand your message. Why limit that reach by using words that the majority of listeners, readers or viewers can’t understand? Our Prime Minister came home from his 18 day world our to headlines like: When it comes to plain speaking, the Prime Minister may be beyond help, What was that, PM? And Rudd says he’s no robot yet he talks like one. Not good.
Mind you, Americans can be just as silly with their use of the language. “Very low food security” was how the US Agriculture Department described the 11 million Americans who sometimes go “hungry”. Wow, it takes a civil servant to come up with something like that doesn’t it!
Outcome is another of those stuffy words that has become commonplace these days. Whatever happened to the word result which sounds a lot simpler to me? Some people I’ve media trained have used the simpler language that I’ve suggested when making presentations internally at work and were really happy about how much better those communications were received.
This stuff works with both media interviews and with other communications as well. After all, when you talk to a journalist you’re really talking to the audience behind that journalist and there’s little difference between that and talking to people in a social situation. If you think about it, the people at next week’s dinner party, BBQ or other social event will be asking you similar questions to the ones the journalist asks you in a media interview and we tend to use simple language socially so why change it for a media interview. The journalist needs to be asking those sort of questions because they represent the public.