Marketing agencies do it; doctors do it and the very worst people are lawyers. And it really annoys people, to the point of frustration.  A couple of examples:

You get told that the patient has suffered an acute myocardial infarction but you don’t know whether he has had a heart attack or an attack of angina.

Your creative consultant tells you she wants your message articulated across a few marketing touchpoints – all you want to do is shoot them!

You are asked to sign a legal document but it means absolutely nothing to you.

These are just three professions where a special language is used, one that most of us simply do not understand. And because it means nothing to you, you have no interest in reading it and you don’t want to hear it. It just makes you feel a bit stupid.

For most of those professions, it doesn’t matter because their living doesn’t depend on you being able to understand. For bloggers, copywriters, authors and any other type of writer, it really does matter. People have a choice as to whether they read what you write. If they can't understand it, they simply move on and find something else that does make sense.

Ask yourself these two questions:

1 – Is anyone reading, commenting and/or sharing my content?

2 – Does my website convert traffic to sales?

If you answer no, then you may just have the same problem.

Three Deadly Sins

Your content doesn’t work for one good reason – you are not giving your target audience any thought. And there are three very destructive habits you can put this down to:

*  you use far too much JARGON that just confuses people. Too many specialist expressions and words that only people in the industry will understand;

* you keep using PAROCHIALISMS – these only mean something to you, not to your readers;

* you use INITIALISMS and ACRONYMS, assuming your readers already know what they mean when they probably don’t.

It’s easy to stop doing this – learn to recognize when you do it and how to deal with it.

Here’s how:

Slow Down On The Jargon

As a rule, keep things short and simple. However, sometimes using longer words is best if you need to be specific and they can make your meaning much clearer. It might interest you to know that the same thing goes for jargon too.

On occasion, you will be addressing a specific audience. You may even need to use specialist terms and sometimes, there just isn’t another word that will fit.

That said, excessive use of jargon is far too much, even for those in the know about your subject. And it doesn’t do your SEO any favors either. When Google sees a page littered with jargon, it just sees a page stuffed with keywords, far too many of them, and quite apart from not liking keyword stuffing, Google simply won’t know what the content is all about.

It is a problem to avoid this when you are writing about something highly technical but there are ways to get around it. For example:

When you use specialist terms, add hover-over text.

Use call-out boxes to clarify and explain the jargon that you needed to use.

Add links to your landing page, blog post, or FAQ page to provide more information.

Link to something like Wikipedia, or another authority site to give readers the choice of more explanation.

Just remember – if you want your readers to stay, call-out boxes and hover-over text work the best.

In part, we look at the other two deadly, destructive sins.