Our study contributes to recent literature examining the effect of linguistic features on investors’ judgments. Prior studies have examined the effects of readability, tone, and language concreteness on investors’ judgments and decisions ( Elliott et al., 2015; Hwang and Kim, 2017; Rennekamp, 2012; Tan et al., 2014, 2015 ). Specifically, Hwang and Kim (2017) examine the effect of readability on firm valuation and finds that difficult-to-read reports decrease firm value. Our paper is different from prior readability studies in that we specifically identify and document the effect of jargon (one particular element of readability) on investor judgment, while holding other attributes of readability (e.g., passive verbs, hidden verbs, overwriting, and wordy phrases) constant. More importantly, we identify three different groups of investors with various levels of industry knowledge and show that jargon effect varies with industry knowledge. In addition, one particular feature of the impact of jargon is that different investors could interpret management’s use of jargon differently—this impact depends not only on their own industry knowledge, but also on the type of jargon and an overall contextual linguistic attribute (i.e., syntactic complexity). Thus, our paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating the joint effect of jargon type, industry knowledge, and syntactic complexity on investors’ judgments. Our findings help managers better understand the implications of including jargon (and different types of jargon) in their disclosures, and they can also better understand the impact of their disclosure choices on their primary investor base.