There are different opinions regarding whether you should use jargon while writing your content. Many suggest that you shouldn’t because they may intimidate your readers and worse, you may also distract them and send them away.
I don’t have very strict opinion on using jargon. In order to understand my opinion, you need to first understand what actually jargons mean. According to dictionary definition, it is a word or an expression used by a profession or a group of people and it is normally difficult for people outside of that profession or outside of that group to understand.
So while writing content, we need to keep two things in mind while using jargons (if at all we want to use them)
- Only people in the industry understand them
- People outside of the industry don’t understand them
With this out of our way, we need to know for whom we are writing content. Are we writing content for the industry people or for those people who are not directly related to the particular industry but somehow make use of the things used by that industry.
Take for example software development. Developers have their own jargons. Terminologies like alpha version or beta version may have no meaning for the casual user of that software. Normal people may not have any idea what database normalization is. They may not know what recursion is, or for that matter, even what is an algorithm. What is an ActiveX object?
When to use jargons and when not to use them while writing content?
We will take the software development analogy again. Let’s take two case scenarios.
- You are writing content for a company that develops and markets software programming tools for software development companies.
- You are writing content for a software development company that sells and markets an accounting software for schools
Content writing for a company developing and marketing software programming tools for software development companies
If you are writing content for such a company, you’re bound to use some jargons because without these jargons you won’t be able to communicate what you are selling and what are the capabilities of your tools. Of course using your tools software programmers will be able to manage their code well and may also be able to reduce their product development life-cycle (again, slightly jargonish) by one-third, but the programmers would like to know the exact features that are being use in the programming tools. They would like to know what sort of libraries are available, what sort of debugging features are there, what sort of flow control logic is used and so on. They would like to know the dirty details because this is how programmers work. So yes, in order to write content for such a company, you will need to use the industry language, the jargons.
Content writing for a company that develops and markets accounting software for schools
A school looking for an accounting software isn’t bothered much about the particular ActiveX components used in the software. The accountant working at the school would like to know how well the software generates the ledgers and the various accounts the school accountant will have to create and maintain. If at all some jargons are to be used, they must belong to the profession of accounting rather than programming. In fact, the content written for the software development company that develops and markets accounting software for schools should be able to convey through its content that it knows about the intricacies involved in keeping accounting books.
In conclusion, jargons are definitely not a no-go zone. Use them, but don’t use them unnecessarily. Certainly never use jargon to impress your readers because, whether they are impressed or not is another issue, they will certainly either get distracted or be put off. While writing content, use jargons when they really contribute towards carrying the discussion forward, otherwise, use simple, friendly and convincing language.