Credit: By Keith Williamson on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
It can be easy for journalists to fall into a routine and adopt the same terms or phrases to express themselves when they are reporting regularly in their chosen field.
But this habit can easily irritate the audience, especially loyal readers. However, you should also be careful not to embellish or add superfluous words where there is no need for them – think of how you would explain the issue at hand to a friend or someone who is not familiar with the matter.
In this Poynter post, Roy Peter Clark recommends creating a lexicon for each of the topics you're likely to write about, asking your sources or interviewees for names of things you are not familiar with, and finding the root of a word to pick up similar terms or meanings.
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