I made a thing.
Jargone is a bookmarklet for highlighting jargon words on any web page.
The list comes from the Government Digital Service GOV.UK style guide, specifically the plain English and words to avoid sections of the guide, which has this to say about avoiding jargon
We lose trust from our users if we write government ‘buzzwords’ and jargon. Often, these words are too general and vague and can lead to misinterpretation or empty, meaningless text. We need to be specific, use plain English and be very clear about what we are doing.
While the guide is very helpful, and includes alternative suggestions for many of the words to avoid, I wanted to be able to spot jargon more easily on the web.
The bookmarklet is very simple. It just adds a bit of CSS styling and javascript to the page and then checks all the words on the page against a list of known jargon words and phrases. Once you run it on a page, offending words are highlighted and, borrowing heavily from the design of Gmail’s handy spellcheck feature, any entries which also have notes associated (suggestions for alternatives, for example) also let you click on them to see the suggestion. It doesn’t (yet) let you replace with a suggestion, mainly because it doesn’t even pretend to be clever enough to get it right. In fact, the implementation is so simple that it’s quite likely to think there’s jargon on a page even if there’s not. For ‘impact’ it gives the advice “Don’t use it as a verb” even when you’ve used it as a verb. It could probably be made a bit cleverer, but as a quick automatic highlighting of things to watch out for, it’s hopefully already quite useful.
Although I based the list on the GDS style guide, I’ve already accepted several contributions from elsewhere. Thanks to everyone who has already contributed.
You can find out more about Jargone or just install it here if you want to try it in your own browser. Enjoy.