One of the most pleasurable things about my job is transforming confused, jargon ridden prose into plain English. Few things bring me as much satisfaction.

You’ll find plenty of references to terms such as CSS, HTML and microformats on this site, but that’s acceptable because most of my readers will know what most of these terms mean. They also describe well established things.

No, the problem occurs when the jargon doesn’t make much sense and reaches beyond labelling definite subjects, languages and processes. For example, have you heard the phrase failure demand?

Neither had I until this morning, but it appeared in an event description I was editing. So I googled it and found this description:

Failure demand (sometimes called failure driven demand) is demand for a service when an organisation fails to do what the customer expects, or fails to do something how, or when, the customer expects it. Sharp End Training

There’s something clunky about  failure demand. I can understand that problems are caused by failing to meet customer expectations. I just can’t see the immediate relationship between the term and what it’s attempting to describe.

I used a plain English sentence instead. I was happy. But then I copped out and added ‘(failure demand)’ to the end of my sentence.

Maybe people do understand and use phrases like this. Perhaps they form a thieves’ cant in the customer service world.

I have a dilemma. Is it OK to use jargon when we’re writing for a clique? Or should we try to eliminate jargon at every turn?