Grammar Moses: TK: Why we need to strike jargon into the gutters (stet)

I enjoy writing letters to readers. Today, I'll take a crack at writing a letter to our staff and share it with you.

Challenging ourselves to be better is good for the soul, whatever you pursue. In our case, when we're better you're the beneficiary.

With that in mind, I offer this up as an open letter to our staff as both the editor of the paper and its self-appointed spokesman for good writing.

Today's topic: jargon.

You might recall I started my career as a police reporter, and police talk in a code that's sometimes difficult to decipher. Eventually, I became a decent translator of copspeak.

However, during my first week on the city staff, I made the mistake of writing about how a village was planning to install French drains. I didn't know what a French drain looked like or how it worked, and I didn't bother to find out (pre-internet) before I turned in my story.

My editor knew because I mentioned that French drains would solve some pesky drainage problems without bothering to write how. He wrote more notes on my story than I'd written in the first place. We went back and forth all day until he was satisfied I knew what I was writing about and could clearly explain it to readers.

It was a good tough love lesson that's now burned into my soul.

That said, here is today's advice on getting rid of jargon:

All sorts of people comprise our readership: some work, some don't; some are cops, some are teachers, some are in tech, some are engineers, some do construction work, some work in retail, some install garage door openers. Some design and make costumes for furries.

And each of these jobs has its own language.

How many people outside the newsroom can tell you with some authority what a nut graf, a cutline, a drophed, kerning and an ear are?

Our job is to write for a general audience. That means we need to translate all of these specialty languages into stories everyone can understand.

In sports, we're looking at a narrower audience. So the jargon of that milieu is generally OK. But we don't want to scare off would-be sports readers or casual baseball fans by blithely talking about Slugging Percentage, Quality Starts (yes, there is a definition) and Defensive Efficiency Ratios without providing some explanation.

We're not writing for Baseball Digest, after all. We're writing for the Daily Herald.

Back to general news: Writing for a general audience means avoiding industry buzzwords.

Say you're writing a crime story:

• Rather than write a "weapon" was brandished, tell readers what type of weapon it was. Was it a dagger, a garrote, a brick, an AR-15, a trebuchet?

• Police report narratives often refer to the generic "vehicle." Don't fall into that trap. You wouldn't tell your mom that a "vehicle" got smooshed by a train. You'd mention it was a city bus or a motorcycle, a minivan, a farm combine, a unicycle or a Toyota Yaris. That is a salient detail.

I'm not even a fan of describing something as a two-alarm fire or a five-alarm fire, although I think most people would divine from this that a five-alarmer is significantly more alarming.

Say you're writing a development story. Watch your use of zoning designations. Does anyone care that a piece of land was zoned A3 and someone wants it zoned for B3subQ?

Only the Zoning Board and the planning department care about the alphabet soup. Just say it was zoned for agriculture and someone wants to build a 12-story hotel with a helicopter combat park next to it.

Make sure you don't get too specific in stories about how things are engineered. Don't get caught up in whether they're using pre-stressed, high-density or reinforced concrete in whatever structure you're describing - unless you're writing about why a parking garage pancaked in a withering breeze. Normally, only concrete contractors and inspectors really care.

"Scaffolding," "chunking" and "backward design" sound like engineering words, but they're education-speak. They're the kinds of things discussed at department head meetings. I don't have a handle on any of them.

It's a good bet the parent whose eighth-grade twins are having trouble with math doesn't, either.

Roadblocks in writing - poor construction, puzzling word choice, extraneous detail - cause readers to give up on a story long before the writer does.

Jargon is a killer, and it's our duty to kill it before it kills our stories.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/executive editor of the Daily Herald. You can buy Jim's book, "Grammar Moses: A humorous guide to grammar and usage," at

grammarmosesthebook.com. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com

and put "Grammar Moses" in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.