JARGON & VOCABULARY
The words that come out of your mouth have the power to create rapport or to alienate your listeners. The truth is we're all experts in what we do. Each of us has the power to click into a particular work-speak that would leave our listeners reeling like a cartoon cat who's been clobbered over the head.
If you speak to a homogeneous group of people week after week, you're a lucky person. Odds are those people share a common point of view and have common words to describe agreed upon events or objects.
But most often in the workplace, we talk to people at different levels from ourselves who are working on different projects with different objectives. Often their expertise, and their language, is radically different than ours. But often we need to persuade those very people to take some action we're going to recommend.

The tip here is to look through the lens of customer service. Take responsibility for every piece of communication that goes on in the room. If you're not certain what your listeners know, ask them. Check frequently for understanding. Watch and listen attentively for clues to confusion.

Imagine you're going to introduce your material as if it were an aerial map. Not much detail, just the lay of the land. Starting just a little higher (less detailed) than your audience's knowledge is good. It allows them to get adjusted before you zoom down into the nitty gritty.

Regardless of your expertise, speaking in a complex way is simply not friendly. How many syllables does it take you to express an idea? Are you saying: "Our work group will need to calculate the impact of employing that relatively little number of terminals"? Or are you saying: "We'll have to see whether we can make do with that few computers." If you're speaking like the first example, simplify!

Also see, Your Audience and Understandability

 

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