I’m sure most of you have served in a leadership position at some time in your life. I think you’ll agree with me that leadership is hard for many reasons. But one of the biggest stressors for leaders is always being in the public eye. Which means your mistakes are public too. And all of us have had those moments where we wish our brain and our mouth had been working as a team.

I heard an old joke about a politician who was out campaigning when a journalist pushed a microphone in his face and asked, “Are you going to join the fight against malaria?”

“Why?” the politician asked. “What have those malarians done now?”

There is an organization in England called the Plain English Campaign that was founded to remove “gobbledygook, jargon and misleading information” from public communications,…