Criminal procedure terminology is a verbal expression of all legislative provisions, all author’s thoughts related to the interpretation of the law, discussion of law enforcement and human rights practice, it is the subject and content of all criminal procedure scientific discussions. The legal content of all criminal procedure terms is inherent in its verbal form. Both should adequately reflect the author’s thoughts, correspond to each other, be suitable for perception and correct understanding by at least a professional reading audience. The author of the paper uses specific examples from scientific works and publicly available dictionaries of the Russian language to show that for the correct expression and understanding of the author’s criminal procedure texts, both their excessive simplification by introducing professional jargon and other colloquial elements and intentional, clearly excessive complication of the author’s texts with scientific, mainly foreign-language terminology, sometimes with a distortion of its actual meaning, are equally harmful. Using deliberately complex linguistic constructions overloaded with terms that are far from the texts of laws and law enforcement practice to express the author’s criminal procedure thought is, according to the authors, usually aimed at giving their texts individuality and signs of some intellectual elitism. However, in reality this turns out to be the exact opposite – stylistic pretentiousness and verbiage, which complicate the perception of what is written by a professional reading audience and can do harm to the scientific reputation of the author.