Roisin Markham

If people need insider vocabulary to join the conversation, the conversation is already doing damage.

Plain English is not anti-intellectual but it seems we treat it like moral failure. Why?

I get it you’ve pushed through the academic wall and completed an MA, MBA and maybe even a PhD… but when the language you use alienates and separates the very thing you claim to be about oh man!

What if we were more relational? How might we treat the language we use as the most generous form of intelligence available? Simply, why don’t we use plain English?

When we reach for the most complex wording first, it can accidentally reward those who already know the code and leave everyone else doing extra unpaid work just to participate. That’s cognitive loading none of us have time or energy for.

It matters in inclusion, diversity, and relational design because language is never neutral. It can either invite people in or quietly sort them into insiders and outsiders.

Good relational design should lower that cost. It should make it easier for people to understand, contribute, disagree, and belong without having to prove their credentials through vocabulary.

Diversity is not served by making the room or anything harder to read. This includes intellectual diversity as well as cultural and gender identity or any other form of diversity we may want to add/exclude.

The point is not to flatten nuance or avoid difficult ideas. But to express them in ways that do not require a translator for belonging.

If an idea is important enough it will stand up in plain English, it does not need the intellectual drip, your ego might, your credentials might but that is more about you than the work.

Maybe that’s it the cloaking of complex language, what I now name as intellectual drip. If it’s a barrier for me to understand what you are saying, fundamentally you are blocking.

I’m responsible for my reactions but when you begin with over intellectual jargon – I experience it as exclusive, privileged and l this is not for me, There is no entry point and I cannot be involved. You’ve already gestured that towards me. I get it.

It’s your club, show your credentials at the velvet rope.

It has a deep triggering undertow for me.

In the age of AI bloatise I sense this has even more significance.

If we register the conversation more human, more reachable, and more honest.

As I deepen into economic literacy I become more fluent but in reality my bridge in remains the simplicity of how I speak about it.

The long weekend in early June I spent some time looking at islands of cohesion and chaos, the space between them. Processing, thinking writing and making a bad art zine. I’m not done yet, there is a piece of creative work wants a bigger expression of making. I’m staying with it.

One of my biggest resistances is to jargon wonk, the expertise that excludes, the over intellectualisation of a thing.

I am not an academic.

I am an outsider. Excluded.

But as an outsider I have more freedom because I am not expected to understand, conform, align. So I won’t.

Don’t get me started on silos.

Oh and before you go, Hemingway is a good app for checking reading level of plain English.

If you have particular plain English tools and tips let me know I’m interested.

Thanks for being here & yeah let’s just use plain English.