Defining Story

Obfuscate at your own peril

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re listening to a high powered speaker give an impressive presentation. But at times it’s like you are hearing a foreign language. You have a good vocabulary, but you feel like you should have brought a dictionary. You find yourself jotting down words to look up later, and discover that you’ve missed key parts of the presentation.

You’ve been bamboozled by an obfuscator.

Obfuscation: “The activity of obscuring people’s understanding, leaving them baffled or bewildered. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.” {www.Dictionary.com}

Beware of obfuscators. They sound brilliant. They must be brilliant because their vocabularies are so superior. Their incomprehensible erudite commentary must be important because no one can understand it.

I first learned the “value” of obfuscation when I decided to major in philosophy in college. I was searching for the meaning of life. I began with introductory classes. I read the assigned readings and wrote papers analyzing what I had read. My papers were clear, easy to understand and to the point. I received grades of “C” or “B-”. Those grades confused me. What was I missing? I thought I understood what I was reading. I was not accustomed to getting poor grades.

I was upset.

I decided to try an experiment. I used my thesaurus to find obscure words to replace my clear ones. I obfuscated everything I said. I replaced my easy to understand paragraphs with cognitive opaqueness yielding professorial accolades: grades of B+ and A.

I learned to communicate at a college level, using the most opaque words I could find in my thesaurus. My professors were impressed. Many business journals are written in this academic style as well. When I began to write computer user manuals and train people, I discovered that my language needed to be more accessible. I had to unlearn my college lessons and use language people could readily take in and remember.

As a communicator, is your goal to sound impressive? Or is it to deliver information that people can understand and use?

If you really want people to understand you, if you really want to make your point, don’t force people to reach for a dictionary when you speak or write.