This lesson plan is designed to enable journalism trainers to teach students the importance of avoiding clichés, journalese, and jargon in their writing.
It’s based on the article ‘Clichés, journalese, and jargon‘ which we recommend trainers study before adapting the following lesson outline.
Sessions timetable
09:00–10:00 – Session 1: Identifying the enemies of clarity
- Aims: To understand why cliches, journalese, and jargon hinder effective communication and to identify them in daily news.
- Presentation: Explain that journalism should be accessible to everyone. Define cliches (overused expressions), journalese (artificial news language), and jargon (technical terms). Discuss how these barriers alienate audiences.
- Activity: Provide trainees with a selection of recent local news clips. Ask them to highlight every phrase that feels recycled or unnecessarily complex.
- Discussion points: Why do journalists fall into the trap of using these terms? Does using jargon make a reporter sound more or less authoritative to a general audience?
10:00–11:00 – Session 2: The danger of cliches
- Aims: To recognise tired metaphors and understand how they mask the truth of a story.
- Presentation: Use examples from the MHM text such as ‘the end of an era’ or blaze. Explain that cliches are often used when a reporter is lazy or in a rush, leading to predictable and boring storytelling.
- Activity: Provide a list of 20 common journalistic cliches. Trainees must rewrite them into fresh, descriptive, and literal English.
- Discussion: How does a cliche devalue the emotional impact of a serious news story?
11:00-11:15 – Break
11:15–12:45 – Session 3: Decoding journalese
- Aims: To strip away the artificial language unique to newsrooms and return to natural speech.
- Presentation: Focus on words like probe, slammed, shocker, and drama. Explain that people do not use these words in real-life conversations. The goal is to write the way people speak.
- Activity: Take a tabloid style lead paragraph filled with journalese. Trainees must translate it for a radio bulletin where the tone must be conversational and direct.
- Discussion: Is journalese used to save space in headlines, or has it become a habit that lacks meaning?
12:45–13:45 – Lunch
13:45–15:00 – Session 4: Translating jargon for the audience
- Aims: To learn how to simplify technical, legal, or medical terms without losing accuracy.
- Presentation: Discuss how specialists (police, doctors, politicians) use jargon to obscure facts or sound important. A journalist’s job is to be the translator for the public.
- Activity: Provide a technical press release from a government department or a scientific body. Trainees must extract the bottom line and rewrite it so a 12-year-old could understand it.
- Discussion: When is it appropriate to keep a technical term? How can we explain a complex term without sounding patronising?
15:00-15:15 – Break
15:15–16:15 – Session 5: Precision
- Aims: To practice concise writing by removing filler words and redundant phrases.
- Presentation: Focus on words that add length but no value (e.g., at this point in time instead of now). Show how precision in word choice removes the need for cliches.
- Activity: Hand out a 300-word article. Challenge trainees to cut it down to 150 words by only removing cliches, redundant adjectives, and journalese, while keeping all the facts.
- Discussion: Does shorter writing always mean better writing? How does brevity improve the impact of a news story?
16:15–17:00 – Session 6: Peer review and style guides
- Aims: To apply the day’s lessons to original work and establish a personal banned list of words.
- Presentation: Discuss the importance of a newsroom style guide. Encourage the habit of self-editing.
- Activity: Trainees write a short 150-word report on a recent event. They then swap papers with a partner who must act as a sub-editor, hunting for any traces of jargon or journalese.
- Discussion: What are the top five cliches we commit to never using again? How can we hold each other accountable in a real newsroom?
Assignment
Write a 400-word feature article based on a complex local issue (such as a budget report or a new healthcare policy). The article must contain zero cliches, zero journalese, and any necessary technical terms must be clearly explained in plain English. Include a 100-word translation sheet explaining why you chose certain plain-English alternatives over common jargon.
Materials needed
- Handouts of the MHM article: Cliches, journalese, and jargon.
- Copies of local newspapers or printouts from news websites.
- Government or corporate press releases full of technical jargon.
- Notebooks, pens, or laptops for writing exercises.
- Whiteboard or flip chart for brainstorming ‘banned’ words.
Assessment
- Participation: Active involvement in exercises and discussion sessions.
- Performance: Ability to successfully simplify complex text during the Session 4 activity.
- Final Assignment: Success in producing a clean, jargon-free feature story that meets the word count and avoids all listed cliches.
Summary
This lesson plan provides a structured approach to improving journalistic clarity by eliminating cliches, journalese, and jargon. By moving through identification, translation, and original production, trainees will learn to value precision and accessibility in their writing. The ultimate goal is to ensure the audience is never excluded by the language used to inform them.
Related article
