Plain language isn't dumbing down — it's harder than jargon

There's a quiet assumption that plain language is the easy, lesser version of "real" writing — that experts speak in jargon because the ideas are genuinely too sophisticated for everyday words, and that simplifying them means losing something essential.

It's almost exactly backwards. In most cases, jargon is the easy option and plain language is the hard one. Jargon is what you reach for when you haven't finished understanding something well enough to say it simply. Clear writing is the receipt that proves you did.

Jargon is often a hiding place

Watch what jargon actually does in a sentence. A lot of the time, it lets the writer gesture at an idea without committing to it. Consider:

"We need to leverage our core competencies to drive synergistic value across the organization."

Strip it down and ask what it's actually claiming, and you find… almost nothing. "Do more of what we're good at, in ways that help different teams at once." Even that is generous. The original sentence is comfortable precisely because it never has to be specific enough to be wrong.

This happens in serious fields too, not just corporate decks. In medicine, finance, law, and academia, a wall of terminology can signal real precision — or it can paper over a writer who hasn't reduced the idea to its load-bearing core. The reader usually can't tell which from the outside, and that ambiguity is the problem.

Plainness forces you to actually decide

To write the sentence above plainly, you have to make decisions the jargon let you dodge. Which competencies? Good at, according to whom? Helps different teams to do what, specifically? Plain language is hard because it closes the exits. Every vague word is a choice you now have to make.

This is why translating something into plain language is one of the best ways to learn it. The Feynman technique — explain it as if to a smart twelve-year-old — works not because twelve-year-olds are the target audience, but because the act of removing jargon exposes every gap in your own understanding. You discover the parts you were only pretending to know the moment you try to say them in ordinary words.

So when a book explains a hard idea in plain language and it still feels rigorous, that's not a downgrade. That's someone having done the difficult work of understanding it completely enough to hand it to you clean.

Plain ≠ simplistic

Let's be precise, because there's a real failure mode here. Plain language is not the same as oversimplification, and it's not baby talk. The goal isn't to remove nuance; it's to remove friction that isn't carrying nuance.

The distinction:

• Jargon that carries meaning stays. "Inflation," "antibody," "compound interest" — these are precise terms that would take a paragraph to unpack, and unpacking them every time would be its own kind of unclear. Plain writing keeps the load-bearing vocabulary and explains it once.
• Jargon that carries status goes. "Utilize" instead of "use." "Facilitate" instead of "help." "Idiosyncratic volatility" when "the risk specific to one company" is what you meant. These words don't add precision; they add distance.

Good plain writing is the result of telling those two apart, word by word — which is slow, judgment-heavy work. The easy thing is to keep all the terminology and let the reader sort it out. The hard thing is to do the sorting for them.

A before and after

Before: "Asset allocation across non-correlated instruments mitigates idiosyncratic downside exposure."

After: "Spreading your money across things that don't all rise and fall together means one bad bet can't sink you."

The second version is longer, and it took more effort to write. It also can't hide. If it's wrong, you can tell. That accountability is the point — and it's exactly what jargon is so often used to avoid.

Why we're so stubborn about this

Every PlainReads book runs through the same discipline: keep the words that carry meaning, cut the ones that carry only status, and refuse to let a sentence stay vague just because vagueness is comfortable to write. It's slower to make a book this way. It's the entire reason the books are worth reading.

Because the promise we're actually making isn't "shorter." It's that when you finish, you'll be able to explain the thing to someone else — plainly, in your own words — which is the only real test of whether you understood it at all. Jargon can fake the feeling of knowing. Plain language is what's left when you actually do.