Is Too Much Jargon Killing Your Corporate Messaging?
- Mar 13, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 30
A client came to me recently, a FinTech company, 3 years in business, and asked me to look at their website copy.
"Unlock Your All-in-One Management Platform" "Streamlining real-time data tools" "Unleash your full potential"
Their website was full of it. The kind of language that sounds like it was generated by someone who had never met their customer:
And when I asked why, they said:"Because all the industry leaders write this way."
They're right. Most of them do.
And that's exactly the problem.
The Severance Scene That Explains Corporate Speak Better Than Anything I've Read
If you've been watching Season 2 of Severance on Apple TV+, there's a scene in Episode 5 that should be required viewing for every marketing team and communications department in the world. (Spoiler ahead — you've been warned.)
For the uninitiated: Severance is a psychological thriller about office workers who have undergone a medical procedure that splits their consciousness into two — their "innie" work self, who remembers nothing of life outside the building, and their "outie" self, who remembers nothing of what happens at the office. It's a show about a dystopian corporation, but at its core it's about identity, language, and control.
Mr Milchick is the manager of the Severed Floor. He is, in every sense, a corporate man. He wears his authority in his vocabulary, long sentences, elevated diction, euphemisms stacked on euphemisms. He speaks not to communicate but to exert his authority.
In Episode 5, Milchick finds himself on the other side of the desk. During his own performance review, his superiors tell him plainly: he uses too many big words. He needs to simplify.
What follows is one of the most quietly devastating moments in the series. Milchick takes a phrase he had previously aimed at his assistant, Miss Huang, and begins to cut it down, word by word, in real time:
"Eradicate from yourself childish folly."
"You must abandon childish things."
"You must grow up."
"Grow up."
"Grow."
One word. That was all it ever needed to be.
The scene works because it exposes something uncomfortable: all that elaborate language was never really for Miss Huang. It was for Milchick. It was armour. Jargon, at its worst, is always armour — a way of sounding authoritative without being accountable, of filling space without saying anything that could be questioned or disproved.
It's a management technique masquerading as communication. And your customers can feel it too.
The Real Cost of Jargon
Most companies treat jargon as a mark of professionalism. It isn't. It has real, measurable costs — to your credibility, to your conversions, and to the people you most need to reach.
It damages your credibility
A survey by communications company Enreach found that 90% of people believe business jargon and obscure wording is used by people who want to "cover up the fact that they have no idea what they're doing."
Let that number sit for a moment. Nine in ten of the people reading your carefully crafted copy suspect you of bluffing.
The language designed to make you sound sophisticated is making you sound uncertain. The words chosen to project authority are actively undermining trust. Every "leverage synergies" and "holistic solution ecosystem" is a small withdrawal from the credibility account you've spent years building.
It excludes your audience — often the wrong people
Here's a dynamic that doesn't get discussed enough: most significant B2B purchase decisions aren't made by a single technical expert who speaks your language fluently. They're made by a committee. A buying committee that often includes finance leads, operations directors, board members, founders, and executives who came up through a completely different part of the business.
Research on B2B buying behaviour consistently shows that purchase decisions involve an average of six to ten stakeholders. Most of them will never attend a product demo. They'll read your website, skim your one-pager, and make a judgment call based on what they understand in the first thirty seconds.
If your messaging is saturated with industry acronyms and insider shorthand, you're writing for one person on that committee while quietly closing the door on everyone else. And often, the person whose approval matters (the CFO who signs the budget, the CEO who gives the final yes) is precisely the person least likely to know what "real-time data orchestration" means.
This is part of the multi-audience problem: the gap between the expert reader who already knows your terms and the general reader who controls the decision. Jargon may feel inclusive to one, but at the expense of the other.
It makes everyone sound the same
Language trends in business move in waves. Someone uses "pivot" in a Forbes interview, and six months later every startup is pivoting. "Disruption" becomes ubiquitous. "Authentic" gets drained of meaning by overuse. "Unlock" appears on roughly 40% of SaaS homepages simultaneously.
When you use the same generic words as everyone else in your category, you sound indistinguishable.
Most tech companies will claim to be innovative.
Most service providers promise exceptional customer service.
Most platforms are described as seamless, scalable, and human-centric.
These words have been used so often, in so many contexts, by so many companies, that they no longer carry information. They are, as the old typographers used to say of filler copy, lorem ipsum — text that looks like meaning from a distance but dissolves into nothing when you get close.
What Is Jargon?
For clarity's sake, here's a working definition:
Jargon is unnecessarily complicated, vague, or abstract language used to impress rather than to inform.
It tends to fall into three categories:
Valueless Filler Words:
Words that occupy space without conveying meaning. "Leverage," "utilise," "facilitate," "synergise." These are verbs that sound active but commit to nothing. They're the Lorem ipsum of business writing, a nonsensical string of words that has no actual meaning.
It fills space without saying much.
Buzzwords:
Terms that enter business vocabulary through mimicry and exit through exhaustion. "Disruption," "authentic," "pivot," "unlock," "elevate," "unleash." Their original meaning, if they had one, has been ground away by repetition. They function now as social signals — I have read the same articles you have read — rather than as communication.
Industry Lingo:
Industry-specific Insider term, acronyms, technical shorthand, and category language that assumes a shared vocabulary your audience may not have. These are the terms that work perfectly well inside a room full of specialists and immediately exclude anyone standing outside the door.
Five Ways to Remove It
1. Define your key points before you write a word
The most reliable way to prevent jargon from entering your writing is to be absolutely clear about what you're trying to say before you begin. That sounds obvious. It almost never happens.
Before drafting anything write out your answers to three questions:
What is the single most important thing I want the reader to understand?
What do I want them to feel?
What do I want them to do?
These constraints act as a filter. Every sentence you write should pass through them. If a phrase doesn't serve one of those three purposes, it shouldn't be there. Most jargon fails all three.
2. Replace vague promises with concrete evidence
Specificity does two things simultaneously: it replaces jargon with evidence, and it makes your claim falsifiable — which, counterintuitively, makes it more believable. Vague promises can't be disproved, which is precisely why readers distrust them.
Not "we save you time," but "95% of our clients report saving over 20 hours a week."
Not "we improve your performance," but "we helped one client reduce customer acquisition cost by 43% in six months."
Not "high-quality results," but a named client, a named metric, a named timeframe.
3. Write to one real person who is not an expert
Warren Buffett, who has written some of the most lucid financial prose in American business history, has explained that when he writes his annual shareholder letters, he imagines he is writing to his two sisters, Doris and Bertie. Neither of them works in finance. He begins each letter with "Dear Doris and Bertie," then removes the salutation when he's done.
The exercise works because it makes the implicit explicit. The moment you picture a real person, someone not inside your industry, someone who doesn't know the vocabulary, and the jargon starts to look ridiculous. You would never say "optimise personnel performances" to your sister.
A more rigorous version: read your copy out loud to someone who works outside your industry and ask them to explain it back to you in their own words. The gap between what you said and what they understood is exactly the size of your jargon problem.
4. Expand, then cut — clarity isn't always brevity
There's a seductive idea in writing advice that clarity equals brevity. Sometimes it does. The Milchick scene works because "grow" is all the sentence needs.
But clarity isn't about fewer words. It's about the right words. Sometimes eliminating jargon means adding a sentence of explanation, not removing one.
"Elevate your team decision-making" is short and useless. "Make decisions quicker so you never miss another deadline" is longer and immediately understood.
We reach for big words when we're not sure the real ones are enough. We say "optimise personnel performance" because "help your team do better work" feels too simple.
But clarity signals mastery. The expert who can explain a complex idea in ordinary language understands it far better than the one hiding behind technical vocabulary.
So strip jargon back and trust your reader enough to give them the real words.
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