Not the terms in your head
When it comes to medical terms, readers don’t know what communicators are talking about, according to T. J. and Sandar Larkin.
We say “hemorrhage”; they say “bleeding.” We say “sutures”; they say “stitches.” We say ” metastasize”; they say, “the cancer is spreading.”
In fact, more than three-quarters of Americans didn’t know that “hemorrhage” meant “bleeding,” according to a study by E.B. Learner, et al. More than one-third didn’t know that a fractured bone was broken.
If you want to reach your readers, use the words in your readers’ heads, not the words in your head.
Help them search.
Searchers use the wrong medical term 59% of the time when researching health issues on the web, according to a study by Alexa T. McCray, et al.
| Instead of … | … they’ll use |
| Multiple myeloma | Blood cancer |
| Diabetes | Sugar diabetes |
| Myocardial infarction | Heart attack |
As a result, these searchers are missing lots of pages — maybe even yours — that include the information they seek.
The good news is, searchers use the same “wrong” word over and over again. So it is possible to translate from medical terms into reader terms.
Whether you’re in the medical, money-management or mobile home business, translate your industry’s language into your reader’s language. Because if you don’t use the words in your readers’ heads, they won’t be able to find you.
Translate into the readers’ language.
Solution: Use the language of the reader, not the language of the industry. These online medical dictionaries should help.
Start making sense
Get the gobbledygook, jargon and gibberish out
Jargon. Buzzwords. Acronyms. They’re things that make your reader go “huh?” And we need to get them out of our message.
Indeed, jargon irritates your reader, makes your message less understandable, reduces your social media reach and influence, cuts your chances of media coverage, makes your website harder to find and demonstrates your lack of knowledge about the topic. It may even suggest that your company is in trouble.
Translate the language of your organization into the language of your readers.
At Cut Through the Clutter — our in-house clear-writing workshop — you’ll learn how to:- Determine when to use jargon to streamline communication — and when to avoid it at all costs.
- Run a simple test to decide which terms to use with industry insiders.
- Turn Google into the best thesaurus ever.
- Define terms the reader-friendly way (Hint: It’s not the way we learned to do it in Journalism 101.)
- Steal techniques from Warren Buffett to make complex technical information easier to understand — and more fun to read.
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Sources: T.J. and Sandar Larkin, “Health on the Web: Finding the Right Word,” Larkin Page, No. 33, March 2006
E. Brooke Lerner, Dietrich V.K. Jehle, David M. Janicke and Ronald M. Moscati; “Medical Communication: Do our Patients Understand?” American Journal of Emergency Medicine, November 2000
Alexa T. McCray, Russell F. Loane, Allen C. Browne, Anantha K. Bangalore; “Terminology Issues in User Access to Web-based Medical Information,” Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium, 1999
Timothy B. Patrick, Harpreet K. Monga, MaryEllen C. Sievert, Joan ton Hall and Daniel R. Longo; “Evaluation of Controlled Vocabulary Resources for Development of a Consumer Entry Vocabulary for Diabetes,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001
Qing T. Zeng and Tony Tse, “Exploring and Developing Consumer Health Vocabularies,” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan/Feb 2006, p. 24-29
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