The Power of Words

[Intro]

Close your eyes
You are walking though the forest.
All around you are shades of dark green.
You smell the musty smell of the forest.
You and start to he the bubbling sounds of running water.
As you get closer, you can see the white water cascading over black rocks.
The musty smell of the forest is replaced by the clean smell of the water.
You sit on a large rock beside the stream.
As you watch and listen to the water flow by, you can feel all of your cares and stress flowing into the water.
They are carried out of site by the water.

[Written vs spoken language]

Spoken language is different than written language.
"The Panglossian planning resulted resulted in a sempiternal development cycle."
When you are reading, you can go back and re-read a passage.
You can even look a work up in the dictionary.
You can't skip back a paragraph during a presentation.
You words and sentences need to be shorter, so they are easy to understand.
You you are writing a speech, you need to write it as if you were talking it.

[Common terms vs technical jargon]

Picture yourself in a meeting for a company that produces a physical product.
The manger comes in, "we have yield problems. Who can get me a Bob and a Wow?"
How many people know what Bob and Wow are?
Bob is the "best of the best" and Wow is the 'worst of the worst".
We need to be careful with the use of jargon, because we can loose are audience. It always makes me smile when someone from marketing talks about the Wow factor. They assume there is only one way to interpret that.

I was working for a company that decided to hire a technical writer to remove all of the jargon from the specifications
When an engineer got a maintenance manual back for the writer, he found the phrase "follow the associated grouping from the main circuit board".
Does anyone know what an associated grouping is?
Ruth, you work with circuit boards would you know what was being referred to?
How about if I used the original term twisted pair?
Jargon has a specific meaning.
In this case, the target audience was electrical technicians.
Because they all understand the terms and those terms have specific meanings, the jargon makes the manual or a presentation clearer.

To answer that question, you need to know your target audience.
Depending on the audience, you may want to avoid jargon, you may want to use it or you may use a few terms after you define them.
If I was making a presentation on high definition TV to dietitians,
I would chose different works then if I would choose my words differently.
Of course, if Emma was making a prevention on dietary misconceptions of the average teenager, she would make the opposite choices.
The question you need to ask yourself is: what word will make my message clearer to this audience?

[Concrete words instead of abstractions]

We need to use concrete and descriptive words.
How could be make "the dog house was too small" more descriptive?
First, picture what you want to describe in your mind [display the picture]
Now write it down in words you'd use in a conversation instead of a letter
"The large, black dog looked down at the small dog house that came up to his chest."

[Summary]

We need to choose words that vividly describe the picture we are trying to convey to our target audience.

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