Identifying (and avoiding) Jargon
Jargon is one of the most important things to learn how to identify and avoid when it comes to science communication. Jargon are words or expressions that are only used by a small subset of people. Planning to talk to people about running your PCRs or an assemblage of species? Unless they’re your colleagues at a conference, you'll probably be met with blank stares. Identifying jargon is an important step in any kind of science communication- regardless of whether your goal is to be able to explain what you do to your family at Thanksgiving, or to get your research covered by international media.
A common recommendation for identifying jargon is to find a willing non-scientist with a fair level of education, and explain your research to them. Ask them to identify any words or phrases that they don't understand. Great candidates for this job are kids who are around 12-years old, and grandparents.
We also talked abut terms that have completely different meanings to scientists compared to the public. In addition to this chart from Carl Zimmer’s advice for aspiring science writers, we spent about 30 seconds coming up with additional terms:
Community, Science, Significant, Diet, Organic, Limited.
A more extreme exercise that you can try for fun on this up-goer blog is describing your research using only the 1,000 most commonly used. Click on the link to open a page where you can try to type in your research story and it will reject any words that aren't in the top 1000. This is just a fun thing to try- and certainly won't be useful for your media strategy. Also, check out the amazing xkcd cartoon using the top 1,000 words to explain how a rocket works, which is what inspired the up-goer blog. Here's my explanation of my research (neither bird or bug make the word list):
Food is important. We all need food to live. Animals that fly eat some of the small animals that like to eat our food. But some of the animals that fly also like to eat our food, so they aren't always good. Places that grow food have changed the land so there are fewer homes for the animals that fly to live in. We are trying to find out if making more homes for the animals that fly will mean we get more good animals that fly and fewer bad animals that fly. Some animals that fly are both good and bad to confuse things. Work is hard. We all love food so we will find the answer.
There's also a tumblr collection called Tenhundredwordsofscience where other people have used this tool to describe their research.
Jargon is one of the most important things to learn how to identify and avoid when it comes to science communication. Jargon are words or expressions that are only used by a small subset of people. Planning to talk to people about running your PCRs or an assemblage of species? Unless they’re your colleagues at a conference, you'll probably be met with blank stares. Identifying jargon is an important step in any kind of science communication- regardless of whether your goal is to be able to explain what you do to your family at Thanksgiving, or to get your research covered by international media.
A common recommendation for identifying jargon is to find a willing non-scientist with a fair level of education, and explain your research to them. Ask them to identify any words or phrases that they don't understand. Great candidates for this job are kids who are around 12-years old, and grandparents.
We also talked abut terms that have completely different meanings to scientists compared to the public. In addition to this chart from Carl Zimmer’s advice for aspiring science writers, we spent about 30 seconds coming up with additional terms:
Community, Science, Significant, Diet, Organic, Limited.
A more extreme exercise that you can try for fun on this up-goer blog is describing your research using only the 1,000 most commonly used. Click on the link to open a page where you can try to type in your research story and it will reject any words that aren't in the top 1000. This is just a fun thing to try- and certainly won't be useful for your media strategy. Also, check out the amazing xkcd cartoon using the top 1,000 words to explain how a rocket works, which is what inspired the up-goer blog. Here's my explanation of my research (neither bird or bug make the word list):
Food is important. We all need food to live. Animals that fly eat some of the small animals that like to eat our food. But some of the animals that fly also like to eat our food, so they aren't always good. Places that grow food have changed the land so there are fewer homes for the animals that fly to live in. We are trying to find out if making more homes for the animals that fly will mean we get more good animals that fly and fewer bad animals that fly. Some animals that fly are both good and bad to confuse things. Work is hard. We all love food so we will find the answer.
There's also a tumblr collection called Tenhundredwordsofscience where other people have used this tool to describe their research.
