I have been doing a lot of talking to people recently, proposing and kicking off various projects, and one thing that’s almost guaranteed at such meetings is someone saying ‘sorry, I didn’t understand that’.
At the end of the day, if someone doesn’t understand something, it’s the fault of the person explaining it, not the person who doesn’t understand. But it’s got me thinking about how we explain what we do, and how we can make it simpler.
For a lot of people, e-participation is still a new area, which has meant in a lot of cases that nonsense is presented as fact to a large number of people. At best, such a practice is detrimental to this area of work, at worst, it’s expensive and even dangerous to the furtherance of democracy.
So, I’d like to see us take a pledge, not to use jargon where better words exist. To make sure we’re always explaining things simply and easily, and to remember that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Without wanting to get philosophical, you’ve got to wonder about why people choose to use language that excludes others. What are they trying to prove, indeed, what are they trying to hide?
The Local Government Association seems to be thinking along the same lines, having just produced a list of the worst jargon found in that sector, and recommending that they not be used. As LGA Chairman Cllr Margaret Eaton says;
“The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases. Why do we have to have ‘coterminous stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?”
My personal favourite is ‘Predictors of Beaconicity’. When the spell checker tells us something isn’t a word, perhaps we should listen to it.
Hi,
Last autumn we organised a workshop to find out what was happening with eParticipation in Scotland to find – obviously in retrospect -that people doing the most eParticipation either hadn’t heard of the word or hadn’t thought it applied to them.
After inviting a few people, I added a definition to the invites and then to the program.
However, I’m disappointed that the LGA are banning the word “stakeholders”. It reminds me of both Buffy the vampire slayer and someone building a fence in a windy field.
-Ella
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Nice post Gez. It’s incumbent on us to have a sensitivity to jargon, and to avoid it where possible.
Of course, where there is genuine innovation, sometimes new terms are needed to precisely express the meaning of something, but this is relatively rare. Too often jargon clouds the intended meaning, where plain speaking would better express what is meant.
We should also write a post on being cautious with acronyms: acronyms are prone to being ambiguous, and often demand more cognitive effort to read than the equivalent long form – when we read we recognise the shapes of words rather than reading each letter. Acronyms prevent this, and we have to reconstruct or recall the meaning each time we encounter the acronym. Related to this, full-caps text is harder to reader because the word shapes are not distinctive.