Quick Overview
- The better you know your business, the less jargon sounds like jargon to you.
- “Write in plain English” only helps if you can spot your own jargon first.
- The fix isn’t simpler wording. It’s your customers’ own words.
- The same exercise that fixes your copy also hands you your SEO keywords.
Why You Can’t Edit Out Jargon You Don’t Recognise
The clearer something feels to you, the less likely you are to notice when it isn’t clear to anyone else. It’s what tends to happen the moment you get good at something, and it’s often happening on a website without anyone realising. This is the curse of knowledge, and once you know how to spot it, you’ll likely start noticing it on your own site too.
Experts often default to the language of their industry because it feels natural, not because it’s the language their customers use. A term you’ve said a thousand times to colleagues and suppliers who already know the industry can stop registering as specialist vocabulary altogether. It just becomes the correct word for the thing, and once that happens, spotting it on the page gets a lot harder.
This is why “just write in plain English” is advice almost nobody can follow on their own copy. You’d have to notice the exact words your own expertise has made invisible to you, which is precisely what the curse of knowledge prevents. It’s not usually a failure of effort or attention. It’s a blind spot that comes from knowing your business too well to see it the way a first-time visitor does.
Why Translating Beats Simplifying
Once you accept there’s a problem, the instinct is often to simplify: shorter sentences, fewer syllables, a version of the page written for someone less capable. That’s usually the wrong fix, and it tends to read as condescending to the audience it’s meant to help.
The fix isn’t to dumb the content down. It’s to translate it: swap internal terminology for the words a prospect would actually type into Google or say to a friend describing what they need. That’s a different task from simplifying, because it starts from the customer’s language rather than a stripped-down version of yours.
The distinction matters beyond tone. It’s about cognitive load. Every sentence a visitor has to pause and decode adds to it, and once it tips too far, the page can get filed under “too much effort” before the visitor consciously decides anything. Getting the wording right can matter just as much as getting the layout right: web design and UI/UX design are often as much about the words a visitor has to process as the interface they click through.
Where to Find the Words Your Customers Actually Use
Knowing you need to translate your copy doesn’t solve the harder problem: you still can’t hear your own jargon. The way round this isn’t to read your website like a first-time visitor, because you’re not one, and you never will be again for this business.
Instead, go looking for language you didn’t write yourself. Enquiry emails are usually the best source, since they’re prospects describing their problem before you’ve had the chance to reframe it in your terms. Reviews and testimonials do a similar job after the fact, often naming the outcome in words you might never have chosen. Support questions and phone enquiries are worth mining too, particularly the ones that come up repeatedly, since a question you’re asked often is usually a sign your site either missed it or answered it in the wrong language the first time.
LET Education Trust, a new multi-academy trust in Accrington, needed a website that explained its governance to parents without leaning on the internal vocabulary of trust boards and cross-phase structures. The site answers the questions parents actually have (what’s changed at my child’s school, and what hasn’t) rather than describing the organisation the way its own leadership would.
Go Deeper
Conversion-Focused Web Design: A Framework for Turning Traffic into Enquiries
Why This Exercise Doubles as Keyword Research
There’s a practical bonus here too: the words a prospect would use to describe their problem to a friend are usually close to the words they’d type into Google. Fixing the curse of knowledge blind spot and researching keywords for SEO end up being close to the same exercise, done once.
Build this into how you brief any copy or content work, including anything under conversion rate optimisation: the enquiry emails and reviews you’re mining for plain language are also a free, ready-made keyword list specific to your business, rather than a generic list pulled from a keyword tool.
Ready to See Where Your Copy Loses People?
A second read from someone outside your business is often all it takes to spot the sentences doing the damage.
