Tag: jargon
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Know Your Audience: The Fine Line Between Technical Language And Jargon
One of the foundational PR rules that any communications professional learns is to avoid the use of jargon – the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group, as defined by Merriam-Webster. In my years working in PR for healthcare and health IT organizations, this has been a permanent item on my…
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Kindly Do The Needful: Coping With Outcomes Anxiety
In healthcare, we’re always talking about improving patient outcomes, clinical and financial outcomes, or even the mind-numbing phrase ‘operational outcomes,’ whatever that means. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of language and performance anxiety, and I keep circling around the concept of what I’ve been calling outcomes anxiety. Our inability to control the future…
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“Please Tell Me It’s Not Another Report” What a Clinical Discussion Taught Me about PR
We work in a niche part of PR healthcare with a heavy focus on technology so as you can imagine we have extremely nuanced discussions about the work that our clients do. This includes how their technology, service or offering impacts the world, what differentiates it from competitors and why providers, payers or employers need…
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If You Really Want to Sell Products, Lose the Jargon
Having worked across a number of industries during my career, I feel pretty safe in saying no industry loves it jargon (and acronyms) like healthcare. The general technology industry probably comes in a close second, but for pure technical mumbo-jumbo you can’t beat healthcare. Part of it, I think, is that the healthcare industry is…