coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can’t simply say things in “plain English” especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it’s not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I’ve ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.
I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It’s often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn’t get to the point. (I’ll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)
I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.
And that’s not all. It’s easy to tell someone the high level area that you’re working on, but to explain the exact problem you’re trying to solve and why it’s interesting? That’s a whole journey into many topics that are very unintuitive for human brains to grasp and sometimes require heavy mathematical abstractions to even see that there’s a problem to begin with.
A big reason why newspapers use so many filler-phrases and redundancy and just don’t get to the point is because journalists often get paid for how much they write; The consequence is obviously: filler-words.
Getting paid for “how much they write” may be implicit. For example, the boss might look at what the employees produce and say “ok this employee is good because they wrote 30 pages, this employee is bad because they wrote only 5”. Even though they might get a fixed salary/month, the one that writes few pages might get fired.
Every single word in the original post clarifies more than plain English. It is more specific and has better nuance than a plain translation.
That doesn’t make it a useful explanation because the audience of the statement is not the in-group using the jargon.
One part of my daily job is translating “technical” into “manager”. The translation always loses fidelity to the original. Jargon exists because it’s useful, not because there’s a deliberate attempt to keep others out. Some will then use it as a shibboleth but that does not mean it’s original purpose was such.
For what it’s worth: that’s true of all translations. I’ve done real time translation from Italian into English and it’s always missing the nuance of the original. I’ve read the divine comedy in English and Italian and the English is always missing the context and nuance.
Language is an abstract representation of concepts and never maps faithfully.
exactly, i’ve noticed some people on youtube can be REALLY good at this, like Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong for example. Just introduce your jargon the first time it’s used and put up a little explanation every time afterward.
In defense of jargon:
coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can’t simply say things in “plain English” especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it’s not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I’ve ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.
I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It’s often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn’t get to the point. (I’ll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)
I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.
And that’s not all. It’s easy to tell someone the high level area that you’re working on, but to explain the exact problem you’re trying to solve and why it’s interesting? That’s a whole journey into many topics that are very unintuitive for human brains to grasp and sometimes require heavy mathematical abstractions to even see that there’s a problem to begin with.
A big reason why newspapers use so many filler-phrases and redundancy and just don’t get to the point is because journalists often get paid for how much they write; The consequence is obviously: filler-words.
Getting paid for “how much they write” may be implicit. For example, the boss might look at what the employees produce and say “ok this employee is good because they wrote 30 pages, this employee is bad because they wrote only 5”. Even though they might get a fixed salary/month, the one that writes few pages might get fired.
Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.
Every single word in the original post clarifies more than plain English. It is more specific and has better nuance than a plain translation.
That doesn’t make it a useful explanation because the audience of the statement is not the in-group using the jargon.
One part of my daily job is translating “technical” into “manager”. The translation always loses fidelity to the original. Jargon exists because it’s useful, not because there’s a deliberate attempt to keep others out. Some will then use it as a shibboleth but that does not mean it’s original purpose was such.
For what it’s worth: that’s true of all translations. I’ve done real time translation from Italian into English and it’s always missing the nuance of the original. I’ve read the divine comedy in English and Italian and the English is always missing the context and nuance.
Language is an abstract representation of concepts and never maps faithfully.
exactly, i’ve noticed some people on youtube can be REALLY good at this, like Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong for example. Just introduce your jargon the first time it’s used and put up a little explanation every time afterward.