Write plainly enough for a 12-year-old to understand. That was my editor’s instruction when I started news writing. Easier said than done. I have a 14-year-old, and communications remain tricky despite having lived with him since birth. Imagine news writing for a whole audience with an average age of 12. At ADB, my team communicates through publications for development professionals. Our style guide gives us similar advice: write clearly, be brief, use the active voice, avoid jargon. Yet as we edit ADB publications, we sometimes fall into jargon-laden ‘devspeak’ or ‘aidspeak.’ Jargon is increasingly becoming part of the English lexicon, and among the more than 20,000 new words added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary since 2005 are many words formerly considered as jargon. Language develops over time, and as it is used. A decade ago, my newspaper publisher told me to use ‘car theft’ instead of ‘carnap’, arguing that the latter is not found in any dictionary. — Blogs.adb.org/blog