Breaking down the babel

It's a problem that troubles both journalists and business writers – making the complex more understandable to a broader audience.

As the writer in such a scenario, your job often entails gathering information from sources through interviews. Often, particularly if the subject is a technical one, the source is going to sling at you the jargon he or she is accustomed to. They'll yammer on in the specialized lingo born of a thousand meetings and interdepartmental memos. If the intended audience of the piece understands that jargon and you – the writer – do also, then it's not too hard to transform the interview into readable copy.

The challenge, though, lies in those situations when the intended audience may not fully understand the terminology used by your interview subject and you, as the writer, don't either. Now is where you really earn your chops as a communicator. You must gently coax the subject into explaining:

-- What do you mean by that term?

-- How can we explain this in simpler language?

-- Pretend you're trying to tell this to a group of intelligent high school students.

Those are the sorts of questions you can ask to prompt the subject to simplify. Usually, the interviewee grasps the need to step away from the jargon he or she is accustomed to and will work with you. Sometimes, though, you can't pry a single, simple sentence from the subject. Maybe the person is more comfortable speaking this way, or perhaps they're afraid that by simplifying, meaning will be lost, though this is rarely the case.

These situations can be frustrating, but you must soldier on. Try harder. Once a source sees that you won't accept their vague, overly technical wording, then they'll usually cooperate. You owe it to your readers to at least try. Don't give up and merely parrot the gobbledygook that your sources mouth. There's too much of that already going on in the business world.

Copy that fails to communicate is a waste of time. Just like the biblical Tower of Babel, it may look impressive but it goes nowhere.