A lot of people in technical fields believe, somewhere under the surface, that the jargon is the value. That if they said it plainly, the client would realize they could've figured it out themselves. So they don't say it plainly. They build a moat of acronyms and hope it reads as depth.
It reads as fog. And the people you most want to impress — the ones writing the checks — are exactly the ones who can't follow you through it.
I've spent twenty years explaining technical things to people who don't have time to learn the technical version. WCAG to a CEO who needs to know whether he's about to get sued. AI implementation to a small-business owner who just wants to know if it'll save her a Tuesday. Litigation exposure to an attorney who lives in plain language and has no patience for mine. Every one of those conversations went well for the same reason: I started from what they needed to understand, not from what I happened to know.
The hard part is the translation, not the term
Anyone can memorize the jargon. That's the easy half. The hard, valuable, genuinely-expert half is taking the complicated true thing and making it land for someone who doesn't share your background — without dumbing it down and without leaving out the part that matters.
That translation is the actual skill. When someone can do it, you can tell, because you walk away from the conversation feeling smarter instead of smaller. When someone can't, they hide it behind vocabulary and call the resulting confusion "complexity."
“If you can't say it simply, there's a real chance you don't understand it as well as the jargon lets you pretend.”
What happens when you drop the fog
Say the true thing simply and a few things happen at once. The client trusts you more, because they can actually follow your reasoning and check it against their own judgment. They make better decisions, because they understand what they're deciding. And they remember you, because being made to feel capable is rare enough that it stands out.
Plain English isn't the thing you do instead of being an expert. It's the thing that proves you are one. The fog was never protecting your expertise. It was hiding it from the only people who needed to see it.
