The Glossary You Never Wrote

B · Plate 08 in the Plain Language series · Other Communications

Every organisation invents words. Most of the inventions are useful: a shared term for a recurring thing saves a paragraph every time it is used, and the shorthand is a genuine efficiency among people who share the referent. The trouble begins when the shorthand stops being noticed as shorthand.

Words cross from internal to public text without anyone deciding that they should. They arrive in a draft because the writer thinks in them, they survive review because the reviewers also think in them, and they reach a reader who has never encountered them and has no way to ask. The failure is invisible from the inside at every stage, which is what makes it persistent.

Three kinds of unfamiliar word

The first is the technical term with a real and stable meaning outside the organisation. These are fine, and explaining them at length can be patronising. A short apposition on first use is usually enough, and readers who know the term skim past it without friction.

The second is the ordinary word used in a special sense. This is the dangerous category, because it does not look unfamiliar. A reader meets a common word, attaches its common meaning, and reads on confidently in the wrong direction. Nothing in the text signals that anything has gone wrong, and the misunderstanding survives until it causes a problem somewhere else.

The third is the internal coinage, which at least announces itself. Readers meeting an unfamiliar compound know they do not know it. The cost is not confusion but exclusion: a text carrying several of them tells the reader that it was not written for them, which is a message no amount of friendly tone will override.

The test, and the list

The test for any suspect term is whether it can be replaced by a description without the sentence becoming absurd. If a plain description works, use the description in public text and keep the term for internal use. If the description is unbearably long, the term is doing real work and should be introduced properly rather than smuggled in.

The list is the practical remedy. Keep a running note of terms that have been queried, misread or explained in a meeting, with the plain-language equivalent beside each. This is not the same as publishing a glossary, which asks readers to do lookup work and is mostly read by people who already know. The list is a writer's tool, and its value is in being consulted during drafting rather than appended afterwards.

The words that hide behind capital letters

Initialisms deserve a paragraph of their own because they compound. A sentence containing three of them is not a sentence for a general reader in any meaningful sense, even when each has been expanded somewhere earlier. Expansion at first use is the minimum, not the solution; the reader has to hold three expansions in memory and match them to three abbreviations while following an argument.

Where an initialism appears more than a few times, consider whether a short natural phrase would serve. Repeating two ordinary words costs a little space and no comprehension. The convention of abbreviating on second use exists for print economy, and in most contemporary contexts the economy is worth less than the clarity it buys away.

The underlying discipline is to notice, once per draft, that a reader will arrive with a different vocabulary than the writer. It cannot be done by rule, because the words that need attention are precisely the ones that feel most natural. It is done by asking someone outside the work to read the draft and mark every word they would have to guess at, which takes them ten minutes and is worth more than a week of internal review.