Writing To Be Read #2: Keep Shoptalk in the Shop

Blogger’s Note: This is the second installment in the Writing to Be Read” series of guest posts by Eleanor Ely, editor of EPA’s The Volunteer Monitor, which facilitates the exchange of ideas, monitoring methods, and practical advice among volunteer environmental monitoring groups across the nation. Eleanor is a noted environmental communications speaker and trainer. Click here to contact her directly.

Eutrophic. Phosphorus loading. Hydrologic cycle.

Technical jargon like this is “shoptalk,” and as long as it’s kept in the shop it’s a friendly animal that helps make communication more efficient and specific. But it isn’t good with strangers, and outside the shop it behaves badly, pushing away the people we are trying to reach.

You often hear the categorical advice to ‘avoid shoptalk,’but that’s an oversimplification, because some audiences will want to learn the lingo. For example, all the above-listed terms have been used in The Volunteer Monitor (but sparingly, and accompanied by explanations).

Writing for the local paper
However, when writing for a broad audience you do want to avoid shoptalk. This was the case for my friend Joan Martin at the Huron River Watershed Council when she wrote a short article that she hoped would be carried by local newspapers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Joan’s goal was to raise public awareness and support for construction and landscaping techniques that protect streams.

Had Joan been addressing her shoptalk-fluent peers, she could have talked about how stream ‘impairment’ like ‘excess sedimentation and ‘habitat destruction’ can be prevented by ‘site-design practices that reduce ‘stormwater runoff.’

For her newspaper article, Joan needed to make this subject material not only understandable but also interesting to the average reader. In addition, she had to sell a solution to people who probably weren’t aware there was a problem.

Shoptalk-free version
Joan titled her article ‘When Rain Becomes a Problem and built her case with words like streets and creek and fish. Following classic principles of good writing, she used strong active verbs and concrete details — for example, depicting a stormwater surge as a powerful torrent that gouges the channel, tearing away the banks and clogging with dirt the gills of fish. She then explained that damage like this can be prevented by landscaping designs that provide a place for water.

Joan also appealed directly to readers hearts, calling the improved designs a great gift to our grandchildren and a way to recreate what we have lost. She ended the piece with a simple and clear call to action: The next time you hear that a new development might be built in your community, ask what it will do with the rain.

The opposite of dumb
Knowing how hard it is to write like this, I get aggravated by dismissive phrases like “dumb it down” and “keep it simple, stupid,” which get it exactly backward. In reality, you have to write smarter when you can’t rely on the familiar shoptalk.

Joan says she went through about eight rewrites and tested her drafts on friends in other fields before submitting her article to three local newspapers. All three published it.

(By the way, the Words That Don’t link on this site has a great list of shoptalk-y words, and better alternatives.)

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