Talking down

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 I'll reiterate one of the common points raised in this
 thread: you have to be pretty darn confident in your
 audience analysis before you can assume that clear writing
 is equivalent to talking down to your audience. That's a
 pretty shaky assumption in most cases, since you rarely
 have a homogeneous audience composed entirely of rocket
 scientists in your field of endeavor.

 The issue of jargon is another touchy one. "Fuzzy
 substructure", in the example that was given, may indeed be
 very evocative and may communicate efficiently to its
 audience. If that's the case, well and good. (I'd assume
 that it means the underlying logical structure is based on
 fuzzy logic rather than binary logic. Would that assumption
 itself be meaningful to the audience in question, or do
 they just use the product without caring how it functions?)
 The problem with jargon is, as others have noted, it's
 often an excuse to camouflage poor writing, and it's by no
 means a given that everyone uses the same jargon you do.
 Can you really expect your audience to learn your jargon
 (perhaps even unlearning their own jargon)? Outside of a
 university classroom, I doubt it. If they won't do it,
 you're wasting their time and yours.

 The weakest excuse in the "don't talk down to your
 audience" repertoire is that clear writing is somehow
 offensive to intelligent readers. I have no study to back
 me up, but I seriously doubt that "Windows API Microsoft
 SDK based software using a C++ object paradigm" is any
 clearer than "software based on the Windows API,
 Microsoft's SDK, and C++ objects". Both are jargon-heavy,
 but the second example at least gives readers time to
 digest each acronym before proceeding on to the next. Just
 because a poor writing style is familiar to your audience
 doesn't mean it's efficient for them.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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