Copywriting: Write Simply and Avoid Technical Jargon

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Copywriting should be easy to read and even easier to understand.

If what you write looks like a Wikipedia page packed with technical jargon and difficult words you only use to sound sophisticated, many readers will abandon the text before they ever reach your call to action.

The job of copywriting isn't to prove how much you know but to get a message into the reader's head with as little effort as possible.

When someone reads sales copy, they don't want to sit down and study it; they want to understand, and understand fairly quickly, what you're offering them, which means you have to make the reading experience easy.

It doesn't matter if you have a degree in ancient philosophy or spent ten years studying literature; if you enjoy writing pages full of fancy words, you can do that when you want to impress your old classmates, but when you're writing to sell, you have to be much more down-to-earth.

Just look at the last sentence I wrote: could it appear in a prestigious academic journal?

Definitely not.

But my goal is to make sure you understand what I'm saying, not to get published by Harvard or Stanford.

I could have expressed the same idea like this:

The persuasive effectiveness of commercial communication requires the abandonment of any self-referential stylistic indulgence in favor of language that is semantically accessible to the recipient. The ostentatious use of a deliberately erudite lexical register produces an unjustified increase in the interpretive effort required of the message's recipient. The resulting progressive deterioration of communicative transparency may ultimately compromise the text's ability to direct the recipient toward the desired action.

Did you immediately understand what I was trying to say?

Neither did I.

In fact, I asked AI to write it for me and published it without reading it because I probably would have passed out from boredom.

And that's exactly the kind of boredom that takes over your readers when you express simple ideas using difficult words, because they have to waste energy deciphering the language before they can even think about the meaning, and nobody wants to do that.

The same problem arises when you use too much technical jargon.

Imagine I'm trying to sell you laundry detergent and decide to describe it like this:

The detergent formulation employs a system of surfactants with interfacial activity designed to promote a reduction in surface tension during the wash cycle. The functional matrix contributes to the dispersion of lipophilic residues through a process of micellar solubilization. The compound's behavior is further optimized to operate in the presence of the thermal and mechanical variations generated during the appliance's various operational phases.

Understand any of that?

No, and just like before, neither did I.

I don't even know what "surfactants" are, and until ten seconds ago, I didn't even know they existed.

So let's try saying the same thing the way it should be said to someone who simply wants to wash their clothes:

Some stains seem like they just won't come out. You put your clothes in the washing machine and start the cycle, but when you take them out, you discover that the dirt is still there. It happens with every kind of detergent; you've tried them all, but none of them solves the problem. The solution is our formula: this detergent is designed to help you remove even the toughest dirt during a normal wash cycle. All you have to do is pour it into the washing machine and let it do its job so that, when you open the door, you find what you wanted from the beginning: clean clothes.

See the difference?

Now, I'm not saying that you or your readers aren't intelligent enough to understand technical writing; the point is completely different, and all I'm saying is that if you want to learn how to write successful copy, you can't force your readers to decode—and often practically translate—what you've written.

Every time you force a reader to stop and figure out what a word means, you're adding friction to the reading experience, and the more often that happens, the more they lose focus until eventually you lose them altogether.

That's why, when I write, I try to imagine that there's only one person in front of me.

I picture someone listening to me, and I try to explain the idea exactly the way I would if I were talking to them.

If saying a sentence out loud suddenly makes you sound like a nineteenth-century lawyer, that sentence needs to be rewritten, and likewise, if you come across a word you'd never use when talking to a real person, ask yourself why it should appear in your copy.

The key word in copywriting is simplicity.

If you can take a difficult concept and make it understandable without stripping away its meaning, you're doing your job well.

Because if readers understand what you're telling them, they'll keep reading, and if they keep reading, they'll understand why what you're offering is right for them.