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It is something of a paradox that where plain language is needed most, jargon is often used instead. This is perhaps best illustrated in job recruitment, where companies offering jobs have created their own hideous non-language:

Moving from hierarchical structures to a process-based architecture, our success has been based on consistent, integrated teamwork and quality enhancement through people. By ensuring consistency in the development and integration of process plans, you will facilitate the management processes to develop implementation plans for the processes they manage. You will also be involved in business plan modelling, rolling plan methodologies and the measurement of process effectiveness. As Integration Planner, your position will be at the interface of the personal, planning, implementation and measurement matrix.

This example, quoted by the Plain English Campaign, prompts one to ask: ‘Did anyone get the job, and if so, what are they doing?’

Here are some more cautionary examples of jargon from the same swampy jungle:

cultivational – fortunately a rare sighting, in an English National Opera advertisement for a ‘Development Officer – Events’, to be responsible for coordinating and administering cultivational and fundraising events. It is just possible that cultivational really means something. Our guess is that it is something to do with sucking up to people to get them to put money into a project. Your guess will be just as good.

driven – as in quality-driven service organisation. As with orientated (see under separate entry), this is merely meant to indicate the firm’s sense of priority – in this case to offer high-quality services.

environment – meaning, usually, the place where the worker will do the job. The firm that boasted of a quality-driven organisation also promised . . . a demanding and results orientated environment. Another company required the applicant to have a background of progressive sales or marketing environment. In this case environment presumably meant experience or business – in which case sales or marketing would have sufficed. Progressive can only mean ‘forward-looking’ – and few firms would be looking for backward-looking candidates! Yet another employer advertised for a worker who should have experience in a fast-moving, multi-assembly environment.

Assuming that multi-assembly has its own meaning in the business concerned, why not simply require experience in fast multi-assembly?

human resources – This term has now supplanted personnel which in turn replaced employees or workers. Personnel, though also bureauspeak, at least does not have the ghastly pretentiousness and pseudo-caringness of human resources.

motivated – one of the most hard-worked jargon words in job advertisements . . . the ability to motivate, lead and be an effective team player; management and motivation of the sales force; should be self-motivated. In the first two examples, we can substitute inspire and inspiration. In the third, it is harder to guess what the applicant will be required to prove. Enterprising, perhaps. Or to show initiative. Or, if these sound too revolutionary for the company’s taste, able to work unsupervised.

orientated – as in results-orientated environment or profits-orientated system, is a high-profile jargon word (as is high-profile). The word is presumably meant to convey what a firm considers to be important. In these examples its use is nonsense-orientated. A company that is not keen on getting results or profits will not be placing job advertisements for much longer, so the phrase is redundant. Another jargon version is success-orientated for the far simpler ambitious. And in any case orientated is wrongly used for the shorter, original oriented.

pivotal role – Fancier version of key role. Neither helps much to explain a job. If the importance of the position needs to be stressed, what’s wrong with important?

positive discrimination – In Politically-Correct speak this means providing special opportunities in training and employment for disadvantaged groups and ethnic minorities. However the term is still widely misunderstood and perhaps best avoided. Favoured or give preference to might be better.

proactive – mostly found in social services advertisements describing the approach to a particular job. It means initiating change where and when needed as opposed to merely responding to events: reactive. Although a jargon word, it is difficult to resist as there is no crisp single-word equivalent.

remit – meaning responsibility: an experience-based understanding of multi-level personnel relationships will be within your remit. Although remit may be shorter it is not otherwise commonly used, and is pompous.

remuneration package – simply means salary and other benefits.

skills – At first sight this is a reasonable word to expect in job advertisements. But there are some abuses, as in interpersonal skills, which presumably means good at dealing with people.

specific – as in the key duties of the post will include developing country-specific and/or product-specific marketing activity plans. Amazingly, that passage is from an advertisement placed by the personnel department of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. They could have said: . . . developing plans for selling our products to particular countries. But perhaps that sounded too boring.

structured – as in it is likely that you will have worked successfully in a sizeable, structured organisation. You would hardly go seeking recruits in an un-structured organisation, would you?

Not so long ago, schools had teachers, councils had social workers and everyone seemed to understand what they did. Now it is not so simple, and advertisements for jobs in education and social welfare contain more verbocrap than in any other field of human endeavour. Here’s some impenetrable prose about a home for teenagers:

The aim of the home is to enable older young people who still have substantial emotional and personal deficits to make planned progress towards personal autonomy.

Even among social workers this is garbled nonsense. Surely no professional catastrophe will happen if we simply say: to enable teenagers with troubled personalities to learn to cope for themselves . . . However, lacking in fashionable jargon, the rewrite would probably result in the original writer having a job security deficit.

The following example, from a publication of the former Inner London Education Authority, characterises the worst kind of jargon abuse:

Due to increased verbalization the educationist desires earnestly to see school populations achieve cognitive clarity, auracy, literacy and numeracy both within and without the learning situation. However the classroom situation (and the locus of evaluation is the classroom) is fraught with so many innovative concepts (e.g. the problem of locked confrontation between pupil and teacher) that the teaching situation is, in the main, inhibitive to any meaningful articulacy. It must now be fully realized that the secondary educational scene has embraced the concept that literacy has to be imparted and acquired via humanoid-to-humanoid dialogue. This is a break-through. [and a load of jargon!]