Plain Language Is an Act of Respect
Jargon is the cost of admission you should refuse to charge.
[ essay ]
Plain language is respect for the reader’s time — jargon is a toll booth you built for yourself.
I reviewed a postmortem last year that was technically accurate and practically useless outside the platform team. Legal could not assess liability. Customer success could not answer the ticket queue. The authors had not failed to understand the outage — they had failed to translate it. The fog of acronyms was cover for concepts they had not fully sorted yet.
They use jargon to signal membership, not to communicate. The reader pays in attention; the writer collects in perceived expertise; the actual message arrives late or not at all. Writing plainly is harder because it requires you to know what you mean before you dress it up.
Write for the person who was not in the room. If the idea survives translation, the expertise was real.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.