Seven corporate jargon questions to put to a sentence

You can read a jargon-heavy paragraph twice, feel that something is wrong, and not be able to say what. The feeling is usually right and the diagnosis is usually missing, because the fault is structural and reading for meaning skates over structure.

So here is a set of questions to put to the sentence itself. They are mechanical on purpose. Each one either produces an answer or produces a gap, and the gaps are the finding.

What to take away

Question 1: who is the subject?

Read the main clause and name the thing doing the action. If the subject is a person or a named group, the sentence is answerable. If it is an abstraction, the sentence has been arranged so that nobody can be asked about it.

"The business has concluded" has a subject that cannot be interviewed. "The directors concluded" has one that can. Both may be accurate; only one is checkable.

Question 2: what was the verb before it became a noun?

Find every abstract noun and try to recover the verb inside it. Reduction was

reduce. Alignment was align. Implementation was implement.

Once you have the verb, ask who was doing it. That is the trick.

That is why nominalization is the most productive place to look. A paragraph that resists this test all the way through was written to resist it, intended or not. A jargon metrics count of nominalizations per hundred words turns that trick into a trackable number.

Question 3: what would the opposite sentence say?

Write the negation. If the negation is something no organization would ever write, the original said nothing.

Nobody publishes "we are not committed to quality" or "we do not value our people". A sentence whose opposite is unsayable is a position that cost nothing to take, and its presence in a document is decoration rather than content.

Question 4: is this a term of art or a habit?

Some workplace vocabulary is precise. It names a distinction the ordinary words could not make, and cutting it costs the reader something. Other vocabulary is a regional accent with no content.

The test is substitution: replace the term with the plainest phrase you can and see whether anything is lost. Where something is lost, name what. The jargon glossary works through several terms that are more precise than their users realize, and the twelve metaphors work through several that are not.

Question 5: can the original be recovered?

For each euphemism, ask whether a reader who did not already know could work out what it replaced. Softening is legitimate. Deleting is not, and the difference is exactly whether the original is recoverable.

"We are simplifying the structure" is recoverable only if the reader is told what the simplification does to jobs. Without that, information has been removed and a pleasant sentence has been left in its place.

Question 6: what would have to be true for this to be false?

A claim that cannot be wrong is not a claim. Ask what observation would

contradict the sentence. If nothing would, the sentence is describing an attitude rather than a fact.

This is a stricter question than it looks, and it disqualifies a surprising amount of ordinary corporate writing. That is the correct result.

Question 7: who is worse off if this is true?

Announcements are usually written from the position of the party doing the announcing. Ask who bears the cost of what is being described, and check whether they appear in the text at all.

Their absence is not proof of bad faith. It is, reliably, proof that the document was not written for them, which changes how you should read the rest of it.

The seven, in order

Seven questions, and a document that answers all seven is unusual. A document

Using this without becoming insufferable

The questions are a reading tool first. Applied out loud to a colleague's draft they read as an audit, which is rarely the reception you want.

The productive version is to run them on your own writing before sending it, and to use them on documents you have to act on. For anything with legal or financial weight, the questions tell you where to seek a proper answer rather than supplying one; the applicable regulator or an advisor does that.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's plain English rule exists because the same problem was found to matter in disclosure documents, where it is not a style preference.

Common questions

Is jargon always a problem?

No, and treating it as one costs you the words that were doing work. The nine jargon errors include cutting a term and losing the distinction it carried, which is a real and common failure.

What if the document is deliberately vague for legal reasons?

Then the vagueness is a decision and the reader is entitled to know a decision was made. There is a real difference between a document that cannot say something and one that is pretending there was nothing to say.

Can these questions be applied to speech?

The first two can, in real time. The rest need the text in front of you. In conversation the practical version is simply to ask who, out loud, and to keep asking until you get a name.

Where should I start if I only use one?

The subject question. It is the fastest, it works on a single sentence, and it finds the majority of what the other six would find. The corporate jargon guide sets out the three constructions that hide a subject and how each is reversed.