Cut distinctions and hardened euphemisms fill a corporate jargon mistakes checklist

The obvious mistake with corporate language is using too much of it. That one is easy to see and easy to fix. The nine below are the ones people make while trying to fix it, or while believing they already have. Each comes with a before and an after; the sentences are invented, and so are the situations.

What to take away

1. Swapping one jargon for another

Before: "We need to socialise the proposal before we action it."

After: "We need to get buy-in on the proposal before we execute."

Nothing changed. The writer replaced two words that irritated them with two that do not, yet, and the sentence is exactly as vague. The check is not whether the words sound corporate. It is whether a reader could say who is going to talk to whom, about what, and what happens next.

Actually plain: "Before Friday, I will ask the finance and operations leads whether they object to the proposal. If neither does, we start on Monday."

2. Cutting the term and losing the distinction

Before: "Two dependencies are blocking the release."

After: "Two related pieces of work are holding up the release."

The second is friendlier and says less. A dependency is work that must finish before this work can start. "Related" could mean anything. The rewrite converted a precise claim into a vague one and called it clarity. Keep the term, and if the reader might not know it, define it once.

3. Using the technical word in its loose sense

Before: "The change is not material."

After: "The change doesn't matter much."

Here the mistake runs the other way. Material has a technical meaning in accounting and law: large enough to change a reader's decision.

The writer meant the everyday sense but used the technical word in a document read by people for whom the technical sense is the only one. Use the everyday word for everyday things, and reserve the technical word for technical claims.

The same trap holds for approved, guaranteed, compliant, partner, and any other word that has a meaning somebody else gets to define.

4. Acronyms that were never expanded, or that mean two things

Before: "The QBR needs the CAC and LTV by COB."

Inside a team that uses all four daily, this is efficient. Sent to a new starter, a board member, or the finance team, it is a puzzle. Worse is the company where one acronym has two meanings in two departments, and both appear in the same document without anyone noticing.

The fix is mechanical: expand every acronym on first use in any document that might leave the team, and keep a list of those with two meanings so that one of them gets renamed.

5. Assuming your jargon is the industry's

Before: "Standard practice is to do a discovery before scoping."

Every firm develops vocabulary, and after a few years it feels like the language of the field. It rarely is. A supplier, a client or a new hire from a competitor will use the same words for different stages and different words for the same ones. The mistake is not having private vocabulary; it is not knowing it is private.

When a term is about to appear in a contract or a proposal, ask whether the other side would define it the same way. If you are not sure, define it in the document.

6. Mixing registers in one document

Before: "Pursuant to clause 4.2, we're super excited to confirm the deliverables have been signed off!"

Mixing legal and marketing register in one sentence reads as neither. The reader cannot tell if it is a formal notice or a friendly update, so cannot tell how seriously to take it.

Choose the register the document's purpose demands and hold it. A notice is a notice; a newsletter is a newsletter. The same fact may need to appear in both, in two sentences.

7. Purging specialist words for a specialist audience

Before: "The regression in the checkout flow is a P1."

After: "The problem where something that used to work in the buying process has stopped working is very serious and needs fixing first."

The audience was the engineering team, who know exactly what a regression is and what P1 means. The rewrite is four times longer, slightly patronising, and less precise. Plain language is defined by the reader. For this reader, the first version was the plain one.

The public guidance on writing for understanding from the US federal plain-language program makes the same point in its own terms: the aim is the word the reader understands fastest, which for a specialist audience may be the specialist word.

8. Faking precision with intensifiers

Before: "Costs increased significantly, driving a substantial impact on margin."

Significantly and substantially are two intensifiers with no numbers, and they feel like quantities but are only the writer's opinion about an unstated quantity. The sentence sounds analytical yet contains no analysis.

Give the figure, period, and comparison, the five parts a number needs to mean anything, as business acumen puts it. If you lack the figure, say so instead of dressing an impression as a measurement.

A related trap: significant has a technical meaning in statistics, and a reader who knows it will assume a test was run.

9. Letting the euphemism become the official term

Before, in an internal memo: "Following the restructure, affected colleagues will transition to new opportunities."

After, six months later, in the same company's process document: "Transition process: see appendix."

A softened phrase used once in a hard announcement is a choice about tone. The mistake is when it becomes the name of the thing.

The ordinary life cycle of a euphemism runs to its end. After that, every document calls the process for making people redundant the transition process, and the word for what happens no longer appears.

At that point the organization cannot talk about the thing plainly even when it wants to, because the plain word now sounds like an accusation. The defense is to keep the plain name in the process documents, whatever tone the announcement takes. Announcements are allowed to be gentle. Definitions are not.

The pattern across the nine

The three grammatical moves that produce evasive prose appear under corporate jargon. The mistakes above happen when someone spots those moves and corrects them without a test.

Every table row uses the same test: what does the reader now know that they did not, and is it true? A message that passes is communication in the sense communication skills uses; one that fails is tone.

Common questions

Is there a list of words to avoid?

Lists help with the obvious cases and are useless for the nine above, which are all about context. The only reliable test is the reader, and the question of whether they can now act.

How do I handle a colleague who writes like the "before" examples?

Ask the questions in the right-hand column of the table, in a meeting, as genuine questions. "Who will do that?" and "by when?" are not criticisms, and answering them rewrites the sentence.

What about technical words that the audience half knows?

Define them once, in the document, in a sentence. A definition costs a line and saves the term. This is what the definitions on business vocabulary are for: a word that has been given its neighbor can be used without apology.