Plain English Please!
Even judges find esoteric and acronym laden prose difficult to handle. The Wall Street Journal published this suggestion to make it plain, from a legal ruling by Judge Richard Posner:
“Every esoteric term used by the reinsurance industry has a counterpart in ordinary English, as we hope this opinion has demonstrated…The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves.”
In this same case, the judge demonstrated how to make the complex understandable, by his explanation for part of his decision:
“If while you are sitting on your porch sipping Margaritas, a trio of itinerant musicians serenades you with mandolin, lute, and hautboy, you have no obligation, in the absence of a contract, to pay them for their performance no matter how much you enjoyed it.”
All writing benefits from clear writing. If you regularly default to acronym soup, try translating some of your messages and see whether the response doesn’t improve because it took so much less energy to decipher your request.
Though my technical background is only cursory from hanging around engineers and scientists all my professional life, I can always pick out the folks who are spoofing. The truly wise are able to distill the meaning to a plain English explanation. The uncertain and inexperienced hide behind four syllable words and acronyms, hoping we’ll be fooled into thinking the topic too lofty for mere mortals.
Everyone else figures out the same thing. Keep it plain!
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