If You Seek To Persuade, Don’t Get Too Cute With Language
Most people have two questions about bitcoin: 1. Will it ever really go mainstream, and 2. What the heck is it?
Even articles that purport to demystify the topic succeed only in deepening the mystery:
“At the core of the Bitcoin system is the blockchain, a ledger that records the rightful owner of every balance of Bitcoin in existence. When you make a Bitcoin transaction, you effectively announce to the system that you would like to transfer a balance of Bitcoin on the ledger from one owner to another. These transactions are grouped into a block and members on the system then compete to be the first person to confirm that the transactions in the block are legitimate. Once a block is confirmed, the ledger, or blockchain, is updated to reflect the most recent transactions.”
(And how about when they attempt to clear things up by defining it as a form of cryptocurrency to save in any of the other crypto wallets?)
Huh? This sheds little light on the concept at hand, but does tend to show that introducing yet another obscure word doesn’t help explain the first one.
Next, consider greenhouse gases. We all have a general idea that these are things that we want to reduce, and that we’re probably not doing as much as we should, but how much do we really know about what they really are? Here’s an article from Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite go-to site for simple explanations:
“A greenhouse gas is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range. Greenhouse gases cause the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone.”
Not much help, right?
But here’s a portion of another article — this one for young readers — that does a much better job of explaining things:
“Greenhouse gases are gases that can trap heat. They get their name from greenhouses. A greenhouse is full of windows that let in sunlight. That sunlight creates warmth. The big trick of a greenhouse is that it doesn’t let that warmth escape.”
There. Was that so hard?
How can an advocate expect an audience to get on board with a position when the language being used provides only a vague notion of what he or she is talking about?
There’s something about creating new and unfamiliar terms and expecting people to catch on that smacks of smugness and haughtiness, and virtually begs regular people to ignore you.
And new terms and names of new products shouldn’t require a lot of explaining. A good test is whether a person unfamiliar with the quirks of the language could get the meaning from the word itself without having to look it up. Consider these examples:
Surfboard, skateboard, snowboard vs. laptop, cell phone
medley vs. mashup
general election vs. runoff, primary
research paper vs. dissertation
point after touchdown vs. 2-point conversion
Given today’s increasingly crowded fields and short windows of opportunity, new products and services have to hit the ground running. They just don’t have enough time to gradually win-over an audience with relentless repetition. (EMO, house, EDM and dub-step simply didn’t have the attention-share and time-luxury enjoyed by earlier entrants like jazz, rock and hip-hop to build a mainstream audience for their cryptically-named musical sub-genres.
USE IT NOW: Check your presentations, articles, papers and submissions for insider jargon that could jeopardize your case. If you really want folks to use, buy or embrace your product, idea or proposal, you first have to get them to understand what it is. It starts with using terms regular people with no special knowledge can relate to.