Fixing Jargon and Corporate-Speak
Jargon is any word your reader has to stop and decode. Some of it is corporate filler such as "leverage", "synergy" and "best-in-class", which sounds busy but says little. Some is genuine trade vocabulary that your customers may or may not share.
And some is your own in-house language: team names, product codenames and acronyms that mean nothing outside the building. The Readability Checker measures jargon density and flags the terms. This guide shows how to decide, word by word, whether to replace a term, keep it and explain it, or delete it outright.
- Three kinds of jargon, three different fixes
- Why jargon creeps into web pages
- Plain replacements for common buzzwords
- Empty claims: delete rather than reword
- Jargon and search: when the trade term is the keyword
- Ways to define a term you keep
- The fix, step by step
- A worked example
- Keeping jargon out of new content
- Questions and answers
Three kinds of jargon, three different fixes
Treating every flagged word the same way is the most common mistake with jargon. Replacing a necessary technical term with a vague everyday word can make a page less clear, while keeping a buzzword because "it is an industry term" leaves filler in place. Sort first, then fix.
| Kind | Examples | Who it confuses | Usual fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate buzzwords | leverage, synergy, holistic, robust, streamline, going forward, stakeholder, solution | Everyone, including the people who write it | Replace with the plain word, or delete |
| Trade and technical terms | damp-proof course, remortgage, VAT threshold, SSL certificate, root canal | Readers new to the subject | Keep if customers use it; explain it on first use |
| In-house language | product codenames, team names, internal acronyms, process names such as "Stage 2 review" | Anyone outside your organisation | Replace with a description of what it is or does |
A fourth kind overlaps with these: legalese and officialese, such as "hereinafter", "forthwith", "in accordance with" and "prior to". It usually arrives by copying wording from contracts and old letters. Treat it like buzzwords unless the exact legal wording matters, in which case keep it and add a plain summary.
Why jargon creeps into web pages
Nobody sets out to write jargon. It builds up for understandable reasons, and knowing them helps you catch it earlier.
- The curse of knowledge. After a few years in a trade, its vocabulary stops feeling like vocabulary. A heating engineer says "system boiler" the way everyone else says "kettle".
- Copying from internal documents. Web text is often lifted from pitch decks, tender responses and board papers, which are written for insiders.
- Wanting to sound established. Small businesses sometimes borrow the language of large corporations, hoping "end-to-end solutions" sounds more credible than "we do the whole job".
- Vagueness by committee. When several people must approve a sentence, abstract words that commit to nothing are the easiest to agree on.
- Keyword stuffing. Repeating a technical phrase because it was on a keyword list adds jargon density without adding meaning.
The cost is real even when readers could work out the meaning. Every decoded word takes attention, and on a phone screen people usually leave rather than decode. Jargon also blurs what makes you different: if every accountant offers "bespoke, proactive solutions", none of them has said anything.
Plain replacements for common buzzwords
The UK government's GOV.UK style guide keeps a list of words to avoid, including agenda, deliver, drive, facilitate, going forward, key, leverage, robust, streamline and utilise, because they are vague or overused. The table below covers the terms that turn up most often on business websites.
| Instead of | Try | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| leverage | use | As a verb it almost always means use. |
| utilise | use | No difference in meaning worth keeping. |
| facilitate | help, run, arrange | Say which action you actually take. |
| solution | the actual thing: software, service, repair, plan | "Our solution" tells readers nothing about what you sell. |
| deliver (a service, results) | provide, do, give, achieve | Keep deliver for parcels. |
| stakeholders | customers, staff, residents, investors | Name the group you mean. |
| going forward | from now on, in future, or delete | Usually deletable. |
| reach out | contact, get in touch, call, email | Plainer and more specific. |
| best-in-class, world-class | delete, or give evidence | See the section on empty claims below. |
| holistic | complete, whole, covering X, Y and Z | List what is covered. |
| in order to | to | Pure padding. |
| prior to | before | Officialese. |
| in the event that | if | Officialese. |
| touch base | talk, catch up, call | Informal jargon is still jargon. |
Empty claims: delete rather than reword
Some corporate phrases cannot be translated because they never contained information. "Market-leading", "cutting-edge", "passionate about excellence" and "committed to exceeding expectations" are the usual suspects. Replacing "world-class service" with "very good service" swaps one empty claim for another.
For each claim, either delete it or replace it with a fact that proves it:
- "Industry-leading response times" becomes "We answer emergency calls within two hours, day or night" (only if that is true and you can keep to it).
- "A trusted partner to businesses across the region" becomes "We look after the accounts of 140 businesses in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire" (with your real number).
- "Passionate about quality" is usually best deleted. The rest of the page should show it.
Jargon and search: when the trade term is the keyword
Removing jargon does not mean removing the words people search for. Sometimes the technical term is exactly what your customers type, and deleting it would make the page harder to find and less clear to the people who arrive looking for it.
Use evidence rather than guesswork to decide:
- Google Search Console. Open the Performance report for the page and look at the queries. If people search for "remortgage" and never for "refinance your mortgage", keep remortgage.
- Customer messages. Read a sample of enquiry emails, reviews and support tickets. The words customers use when describing their problem are the words your page should use.
- The sales conversation. Ask whoever answers the phone which terms they have to explain every week. Those terms need explaining on the page too.
The pattern that works for both search and readers is to use the customer's term in the heading and the first sentence, then explain any trade term that follows. "Boiler not working? Check the pressure first" works better than "Low system pressure fault diagnosis", but the page can still go on to explain what the pressure gauge is and where to find it.
Ways to define a term you keep
Once you have decided a term stays, make sure a newcomer can understand it without leaving the page. Choose the lightest method that works.
- A short definition in the same sentence. "Your EPC, the energy performance certificate that rates a home from A to G, must be shown to buyers." This suits most terms.
- An example instead of a definition. "Consumables, such as filters, bulbs and batteries, are not covered." Examples are often quicker to grasp than definitions.
- A dedicated sentence. For a central concept, give it its own sentence or short paragraph where it first appears.
- A glossary page. Useful for sites with many terms, such as financial or technical services. Link the term to its glossary entry on first use, but still give a short in-line meaning so readers are not forced to click.
Accessibility guidance backs this up. WCAG 2.2 success criteria 3.1.3 Unusual Words and 3.1.4 Abbreviations,
both at level AAA, ask for a way to find the meaning of jargon, idioms and abbreviations. The HTML <abbr>
element with a title attribute is sometimes suggested for this, but the title text is not
reliably shown on touch screens or read by all screen readers, so spelling the term out in the text is
the dependable approach.
<p>We will send your P60, the end-of-year certificate showing the pay
and tax deducted in the tax year, by the end of May.</p>The fix, step by step
Step 1
Sort the flagged terms into three piles
Run the page through the Readability Checker and copy every term it flags for jargon into a list, adding any others you notice as you read. Put each one into one of three piles: corporate buzzwords such as leverage or holistic, trade terms that belong to your industry, and in-house words such as team names, codenames and internal acronyms. Each pile gets a different treatment, so this sorting stops you replacing a precise term with something vaguer.
Step 2
Replace buzzwords with the plain word they stand for
Work through the buzzword pile and ask what each word really means in its
sentence. Replace leverage and utilise with use, facilitate
with the action you take, stakeholders with the group you mean, and solution
with the actual product or service. Remove padding such as in order to and going forward.
Read each changed sentence again to make sure the meaning survived and the grammar still fits around
the new word.
Step 3
Delete empty claims instead of rewording them
Find phrases such as world-class, market-leading, cutting-edge and passionate about excellence. They cannot be translated because they carry no information. Either delete them or replace them with a specific, checkable fact, such as a response time you actually meet, the number of clients you serve or a qualification your staff hold. Only use facts you can prove, since misleading claims can create commercial and legal problems as well as sounding hollow.
Step 4
Check trade terms against the words customers use
For each trade term, look at the page's queries in the Google Search Console Performance report and at a sample of customer emails, reviews and support tickets. If customers use the term themselves, keep it. If they describe the same thing differently, lead with their words and mention the trade term second. This keeps the vocabulary people search for on the page while making sure newcomers are not shut out in the first sentence.
Step 5
Define the terms you keep on first use
Wherever a kept trade term first appears, add a short explanation in the same sentence, set off with commas or a dash, or give a quick example of what it covers. Use the term the same way every time afterwards, without switching to synonyms that might suggest a different thing. For sites with many terms, add a glossary page and link to it, but still give the short meaning in line so readers do not have to click away.
Step 6
Spell out acronyms and in-house names
Write every acronym in full the first time it appears on each page, with the short form in brackets afterwards, unless it is genuinely better known than the full form, such as VAT or PDF. Replace internal names, such as a product codename or a department title, with a plain description of what the thing does for the customer. Readers arriving from search land partway into your site, so define terms on every page, not just once.
Step 7
Write a shared word list for the team
Turn your decisions into a short document with three columns: words to avoid with their replacements, trade terms to keep with an approved one-line definition, and internal names with their public descriptions. Share it with everyone who writes or edits web copy, including agencies and freelancers. Re-run the Readability Checker on the page to confirm jargon density has fallen, and add new offenders to the list whenever you spot them.
A worked example
This paragraph is from the services page of a fictional IT support company, Brightwell Systems.
Before
"Brightwell leverages best-in-class RMM tooling to deliver proactive, holistic managed services, enabling SMEs to streamline their IT estate and focus on core competencies going forward."
Sorting the terms: "leverages", "best-in-class", "deliver", "holistic", "streamline", "core competencies" and "going forward" are buzzwords. "RMM" (remote monitoring and management) and "managed services" are trade terms. "SMEs" is an acronym many small business owners do not use about themselves. "IT estate" is borderline in-house language.
After
"We look after your computers, network and software for a fixed monthly fee. Our monitoring software watches every device around the clock and warns us about problems, such as a failing hard drive, before they stop your staff working. That leaves you free to run your business."
The rewrite keeps the idea of managed services but describes it in terms of what the customer pays and gets. "RMM" became "monitoring software" with an example. If Search Console showed that customers search for "managed IT services", that phrase would belong in the heading above this paragraph, with the paragraph explaining what it means.
Keeping jargon out of new content
- Write briefs in plain English. Writers echo the language of the brief. A brief full of buzzwords produces a page full of them.
- Edit copied text. Anything pasted from a proposal, a brochure or a supplier's description needs a jargon pass before it goes on the site.
- Use a fresh reader. Ask someone outside your team to underline every word they would have to think about. Their list is more reliable than yours.
- Keep the word list alive. Review it every few months and add terms that keep coming back.
- Check descriptions and headings too. Meta descriptions, button labels and headings are short, so one jargon word takes up a large share of them.
Jargon often travels with long, abstract sentences. If your pages also score poorly on grade level, see fixing a high reading grade level, and for pages where the doing is hidden, fixing excessive passive voice.
1. What is the difference between jargon and technical terms?
A technical term has a precise meaning that no everyday word captures, such as damp-proof course or capital gains tax. It becomes jargon when your reader does not know it and you have not explained it. Corporate buzzwords are different again: words like leverage or synergy usually replace a plain word without adding precision. Keep technical terms your readers need and explain them on first use, and replace buzzwords with the plain word they stand for.
2. Should I remove industry terms that people search for?
No. If Google Search Console shows people finding the page with a trade term, or your customers use it in their emails, the term belongs on the page. Removing it would make the page less findable and less recognisable to the people looking for it. Instead, use it where it naturally fits, often in a heading, and add a short plain explanation the first time it appears so that newcomers can follow too.
3. How do I explain a technical term without slowing experts down?
Put a short definition inside the same sentence, set off with commas or a dash, rather than a separate paragraph. Experts skim past a few words they already know without much cost, while newcomers get what they need without leaving the page. An example often works even better than a definition. For longer explanations, link to a glossary entry or a dedicated guide so experts can skip it entirely and beginners can follow the link.
4. Is it wrong to use acronyms on a web page?
Not at all, provided readers know what they stand for. Spell an acronym out in full the first time it appears on each page, with the short form in brackets, then use the short form. Skip this only for acronyms that are more familiar than their full form, such as VAT, PDF or USB. Remember that visitors from search often land on a single page, so definitions given elsewhere on the site do not help them.
5. Why does corporate jargon feel professional if it makes text harder to read?
Because we see it so often in business settings that it becomes a signal of belonging rather than a way of saying something. For readers, though, it mostly adds effort and hides the concrete offer. Plain, specific language tends to sound more confident, because it commits to something checkable. A page that says we answer calls within two hours sounds more professional than one promising responsive, customer-centric service delivery, and it tells the reader something.
6. How does the Readability Checker decide what counts as jargon?
It compares the words on your page with lists of corporate and technical terms and reports jargon density, the share of flagged terms in your text, along with the terms themselves. Because it works from lists, it cannot know your audience. A term flagged on a page for accountants may be perfectly normal there. Treat each flag as a prompt to ask whether your readers know the word, then decide to replace, explain or keep it.
7. Does removing jargon help with AI search and answer engines?
It can help indirectly. Plain sentences that state one clear fact are easier for any system to quote accurately, and a page that explains its terms gives assistants the context they need to summarise it correctly. But no search engine or AI provider publishes a jargon threshold, so do not expect a direct effect. The main reason to remove jargon is that human readers understand and act on the page more easily.
The Readability Checker measures jargon density alongside Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, sentence and paragraph length and passive voice, and flags the sentences that need attention.
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