Press Release Tip 32

Don’t use jargon, buzzwords, acronyms, abbreviations

Try to guess what the following acronyms stand for:

• DMP and PICA
• GNI
• AA (Hint: It has nothing to do with alcohol)
• OSS

Unless you work at the companies that issued these press releases, or you work in the industries they’re in, you probably wouldn’t know. Yet I saw all those abbreviations in press releases that were published online, and they made my eyes glaze over. I found DMP and PICA in the same headline.

Confused readers don’t bother hanging around. They simply bail out.

Industry-specific phrases that only people in that industry can understand, otherwise known as jargon and buzzwords, is rampant in press releases. If you work in the industrial engineering sector, for example, and you’re writing a release that you want people in other industries to read, most of them probably won’t know what “interoperability issues,” “network protocols” and “control variables” mean. 

Unless you’re optimizing a press release for industry-specific phrases like those, avoid industry jargon.

Avoid using abbreviations on second reference unless it’s a well-known abbreviation like the FBI or CIA. If you’re writing about the National Speakers Association, for example, call it “the speakers association” on second reference.    

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Next: Use keywords.