Simple and right aren't opposites
Recently, I had a little run-in with compliance, and it got me thinking. If you don't obsessively follow all my postings, here's what happened.
I wrote a guide aimed at consumers. In it, there were a few sections that were more legal-y because it talked about meeting certain requirements. I filed it off and then got the dreaded Google Docs edit email ping.
Compliance wanted to change a line. Their reasoning was good. They thought readers wouldn't know what a term meant, so they swapped in something plainer.
The plainer version was clearer. But also technically wrong. The legal term covered five different ways to satisfy a requirement, and the simple word covered one of them. Anyone reading it would have walked away thinking they had fewer options than they actually had.
I pushed back on them to keep the legal term in, but I threw out my original copy and fixed it to be much simpler and clearer for the audience.
Cutting on sight is the problem
More recently, I was working on something at the other end of the spectrum, aimed at senior execs at large financial firms. I was trying to de-consultant-speakify (I feel like if I just put more hyphens here this can become a real word) and had my metaphorical red pen out to start chopping at the jargon.
And went too far.
My client liked the prose and how I simplified things, but I cut out a little too much. There were some real industry terms with specific meanings, and the kind of shorthand people in that world use every day. Cutting them would have made the piece more vague and read to the audience as if the client didn't know the material.
So they got put back in, and I kept the simplified phrasing around the industry-speak instead.
In both cases, simplification was the goal, but cutting would have hurt the content and not delivered what the readers needed. The technical terms mattered. For one reader, it gave them correct legal information, and for the other it showed they could trust the company could speak about this topic authoritatively.
A lot of technical terms can carry meaning, while words like 'leveraging' 'holistic' and 'synergy' often sail through edits because they sound professional, even if they carry nothing at all.
The audience decides which words you keep
For an executive reader, technical signals that you understand their business. Howeverrrrr, that doesn't mean you can go wild writing dense or overly academic prose that reads like a college thesis.
I tried to do this as a baby writer to sound smart, and a kind editor sat me down and told me I wasn't getting paid by the syllable and to please consider writing like a normal person moving forward.
Clear and direct still wins. But sometimes, you have to learn to be clear around a harder vocabulary.
Readers come with a question and they don't want to decode anything, or they'll leave. But the plain version still has to be accurate, or you've traded one problem for a worse one.
I use a pretty simple test: Does this word have a specific meaning that no plain word replaces? If it does, keep it and simplify everything around it. If it doesn't, then it was never doing anything for you (or the reader) in the first place.
The AI part you knew was coming
And since we can't go 30 seconds without mentioning AI nowadays, there's another side benefit of this.
Brands keep thinking about how they show up in AI answers. So in a practical sense, you want your content to:
Use clear and direct writing over unnecessarily dense prose.
Avoid jargon unless it's necessary for precision and defined for the reader.
Keep the underlying expertise. Clear technical content with definitions, specific evidence, and concrete numbers is more citable than vague “simple” content or opaque jargon-heavy text.
Mostly though, write it for the person on the other end. Know who is reading, keep the words that earn their place, and cut the ones that were only ever there to sound smart.
Originally published in The Usefulness Gap on LinkedIn. Subscribe here.
