Member Article

Travel insights

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision

We’ve been spread hither and yon recently; parachute training; running a bomb-burst from the office; keeping a skid on; spread thin.

In other words we’ve been very busy and have been working in lots of different parts of the country. I’m not complaining (far from it!) but it’s been interesting to see how different people in different parts of the country have described our workrate and itinerary. Of course, the opening paragraph to this piece is easy to understand (isn’t it?) despite being full of odd phrases - the context helps. You only need to understand one of the phrases to sort out the others. All of the phrases, incidentally, have been used to describe how busy we’ve been by people in different parts of the country.

But what about the jargon that you can’t translate? We’ve spent some time recently with companies who talked about Office Eyeline: they wanted to know if someone was Skyscraping. Neither of those phrases was a problem when they talked to each other but it became significant problem when they talked to us about it.

It was also a problem when they made presentations about what they did for prospective clients. A low Office Eyeline is a good idea, it turns out - now I know what it is - and it was almost exactly what our client’s prospective clients needed. But by using the jargon in the presentation there was no way that anyone could know that.

Jargon has two uses, neither of which is appropriate for the presentation. Firstly, it’s a kind of convenient shorthand - but one which as often as not simply confuses those people who aren’t in the know. Secondly, it’s a a way of defining who’s an “insider” and who’s an “outsider”: if you don’t understand, you’re not one of us.

So the jargon has to go, obviously. The only question is “How?” and strategies for spotting your own jargon deserve a whole article to themselves.

In the meantime, I’d be fascinated to hear of readers’ experience of bad use of jargon in presentations - or even letters, adverts and so on: you can contact us at sme@curved-vision.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .