What do these instructions mean: “clean a kettlebell to the racked position”? They have nothing to do with polishing the kitchen copper. They also don’t relate to hanging heavy items in church towers.

In fact, these instructions are the first step of various exercises you can perform with a heavy metal ball with a handle (a kettlebell). Searching for the phrase will dig up plenty of instructional videos showing you how this is done.

Usually, a key guideline for writing digital copy is to use simple language: familiar words and short sentences. To reach a broad consumer audience, write at an 8th grade reading level. But what if you’re not targeting everybody, but have a narrow audience for your, say, B2B site? In that case the advice changes.

Simple Writing for Advanced Readers

Even for specialized audiences it’s still best to write as simple as possible. Even highly educated people don’t want to struggle to read your site. You do not impress anybody by spouting highfalutin words or complex sentence structures that require careful parsing. People don’t pay close attention to web content.

In particular, users take around 10 seconds to decide whether a web page is worth their time at all. So if you can’t communicate your key point quickly, you won’t get any message across, because the user will have left the building.

Targeted Writing for Expert Readers

But simple writing for a group of engineers or physicians is not the same as simple writing for a group of applicants for unemployment insurance. First, when you write for a specialized group that includes people with higher education levels, you can allow yourself a somewhat higher reading level, while still keeping it a good deal below the target audience’s actual education level. For example, we typically write our articles around a 12th-grade reading level (i.e., high-school graduates) even though almost all our readers have college degrees. The article you’re reading right now would be annoyingly difficult for many low-end consumers, but it’s reasonably easy reading for you (I hope).

Second, don’t restrict yourself to familiar words. Specialized words often make text easier to understand when they’re the right terminology for the audience. Take my example of cleaning a kettlebell. If you’re targeting fitness enthusiasts, it would be horrible to employ a circumlocution like “use one hand to grab the heavy metal ball by the handle and swing it up until it rests against your forearm.” While each of these individual words are more commonly used in everyday language, the full instruction isn’t precise enough to indicate exactly what should be done. Also, somebody who trains with kettlebells would refer to them as such, and not as “a heavy metal ball with a handle.”

Jargon has a bad reputation in communications circles: in fact, a thesaurus suggests “waffle”, “gobbledygook”, “guff”, and “mumbo jumbo” as possible substitutes. But that’s because jargon obscures the message for readers outside a field. For professionals, enthusiasts, hobbyists, or others who specialize in a field, using that field’s jargon improves communication. Furthermore, using appropriate language defines you as a fellow insider.

Specialized language is not only more concise but also clearer, as long as the reader is a specialist who understands the terminology. If you’re writing for beginners or trainees, it’s certainly best to define any specialized terms you’re using.

A huge benefit from using specialized words is that they vastly improve SEO since your target audience is likely to employ these same terms in queries. In fact, a search for “swing heavy metal ball” finds pages about wrecking balls, not exercise videos.

Don’t go overboard and stuff your web copy with complex terms. Definitely don’t make anything more complicated than it has to be. Skilled users still prefer easy sites. But it’s always been a basic usability guideline to “speak the user’s language.” So to the extent that your readers are specialists who use a specialized vocabulary, do use those same words when writing for that audience.