Run a jargon audit on every key explanation

Go word by word through your explanation and mark every term a newcomer would not know.

Why it works

Jargon is invisible to its users because it has become the natural label for a concept they no longer have to decode. Experts stop hearing the words as words. A jargon audit forces an explicit pass through the explanation and treats each technical term as a potential break point — restoring the deliberate attention that fluency erased.

How to do it

1. Write out your explanation in full, or record and transcribe it.
2. Highlight every term that requires more than two years in the field to recognize.
3. For each highlighted term: either replace it with plain language or define it explicitly the first time it appears.
4. Read the clean version to a smart non-expert and ask them to flag anything that still feels opaque.

Evidence

Plain-language research consistently finds that technical documents are understood faster and more accurately after jargon reduction, even by moderately informed audiences. The effect is reliable in health communication and legal writing research. Oppenheimer (2006) showed experimentally that needlessly complex vocabulary lowers reading fluency and makes the author seem less intelligent — evidence that unaudited jargon actively costs the expert credibility, not just clarity. (observational)

Most rigorous studies are in health literacy and legal document comprehension; effects in real-time verbal explanation are plausible but less directly measured.

Sources

• Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139–156.

Common mistake

Auditing for words you think sound jargon-y rather than for words a novice would actually not know — causing you to simplify cosmetically while leaving the real barriers intact.