- See Gallery of Jargon Hell
- Avoid clichés
- 'Politically incorrect' or 'PC' are currently top of my cliché shitlist.
- A person has 'influence', two cars smashing into each other cause an 'impact'. Save 'impact' for the concrete kind where ambulances or mechanics or pathologists get called while using 'influence' for marketing, business and less concrete kinds of change in the world. Even better, mix in that nice word 'effect'.
- Never use the verb 'to dialogue' (US: 'to dialog'). There are so many nice words you can use to describe the process of interlocution. 'To dialogue' is an utterly negligent and unsupportable bit of verbification.
- "Skilling up" is a horrible, ugly phrase for horrible, ugly people. Never use it. Use "learning new skills", "training", "education" etc.
- Don't be surprised when people trained in logic wince when you say that something "begs the question". That term has a clear, specific meaning. The phrase you are looking for is "raises a question" or "prompts a question". See Beg The Question - Get It Right.
- Plenty of people, mostly in the United States, say "infer" when they mean "imply". If you use the two interchangably or wrongly, it implies that you are stupid. Or at least I infer that you are stupid. See this page.
- Apple's popular range of personal computers is called a Macintosh, which is often shortened to "Mac". It's not an abbreviation - it is "Mac" not "MAC". If you write of "PCs and MACs", stop doing so. It makes you look very stupid.
- It has become a trend in the British media to stop capitalising all the letters in many abbreviations. The primary offender is BBC News online. We now get "Wpc" (Woman Police Constable), "Hips" (Home Information Packs), "Aids" (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), but not "Dvd" or "Sms". They claim it's because of things like "Nato", which is pronounced as a word, while "DVD" is pronounced as the three letter syllables. Which would be fine, but we say "W-P-C" not "Wupuck" for Woman Police Constable. This stupid policy means we now get headlines like "Hips extended to three-bed homes", which sounds uncomfortable and vaguely sexual in a property-porn way.
- I find the current trend of referring to people by their honorific prefix and their first name, but not their surname, to be very bizarre. "Sir John Smith" is referred to as "Sir John". I saw a letter recently that referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury as "Archbishop Rowan" three times. If you are on first name terms with the Archbishop of Canterbury, just call him "Rowan". It feels extremely uncomfortable to mix the informal and formal - it's like the literary equivalent of wearing a top hat and jogging bottoms. It's like if someone called me "Mr Tom". No, I'm either "Tom" or I'm "Mr. Morris" or maybe "Mr. Tom Morris" or just "Tom Morris".