I agree with most of this (with a circumstantial disagreement on the multiple negatives thing. Statistics is wild for multiple negatives. âWe fail to reject the null hypothesisâ is still one of the funniest phrases that I was 100% required to include. Thatâs 3 negatives. three!). This is solid advice! The minutiae varies depending on the field youâre writing in, but yeah. Iâm actually not terrible at it when Iâm not on tumblr!
I figure I might as well clarify (hehe) a few things, and also give a bit of justification for the whole âwe use too much jargonâ argument, at least in my specific case. It gets a little bit philosophy-of-science-y, so bear with me, and keep in mind that âAll Generalisations Are Wrongâ. idk anything about the humanities, for example.
My addition to this post was specifically about my thesis in ecology/ evolution. Generally, a thesis is allowed to be a little more wordy than, say, an article in the journal Nature. Also, a large part of my thesis is... honestly kind of wildly intersectional. My defence committee includes an expert in materials science/biophysics, one in taxonomy, one in behavioural ecology, and one in biostatistics.
Hereâs the thing. These experts... disagree about what does and does not warrant jargon. They also disagree on what is and isnât common knowledge. They disagreed a lot. With each other. With me. With themselves, on one notable occasion.Â
Example: the materials science expert wanted more jargon for the materials science elements, which would make sense if this was a purely materials science paper. But the biostatistics expert wanted less jargon for materials science, bc he said he kept getting lost in it all, even with the helpful glossary i included in the appendix.Â
So what I have are 4 experts in 4 different fields that... donât always overlap as much as you might think. Basically, in order to make everyone happy, I had to define everything, but not too many things (because it got too confusing). All four of them were simultaneously asking me for more jargon and less jargon. And I kind of realised something strange. Different fields of science... are sometimes really bad at communicating with one another. Scientists often donât know much jargon outside of their incredibly specific field, even for fields that are related and should probably be mutually intelligible. This can be a problem when a paper includes multiple fields.Â
So I just started... avoiding jargon altogether. Which, of course, led to requests that I use more of it. Which led to frustration. Which, eventually, led to my first addition to this post.
Which isnât to say that there isnât some very good intersectional research out there! There is. But maybe not as much as there could be. I believe academia has this problem of... creating bubbles. Each field creates their own jargon that is completely incomprehensible anyone outside of that specific bubble, and when a topic comes up that encompasses multiple fields? Things get messy. I also discovered this when working on a review paper with a larger group of scientists. Sometimes, we are really really really bad at talking to one another. This is not helped by the fact that we often have a hard time admitting that we donât know something. especially when the people around us seem to think itâs obvious. And honestly, sometimes science suffers for it. It would be easier to share knowledge between fields if we could understand what weâre saying.
And Iâm not necessarily saying that jargon is useless. Itâs often quite useful! Especially when the articles we publish have crazy word-limits that mean we donât have room to explain things, or when thereâs too many layers to explain without an entire literature review. But when a biology paper is completely incomprehensible to an expert biologist, simply because theyâre not an expert in that specific sub-field, then I think we should consider what weâre doing and how weâre doing it, and if maybe there could be a better way.
Oh, and for context, the word âhugeâ was used in a sentence that was intended to invoke a sense of wonder at the sheer scale of diversity we see in life. Something like:
âThe potential diversity for this form of communication is huge, and we have only just begun to consider the possible avenues of inquiry we may explore moving forward.â
idk. I ended up cutting it. too much whimsy. now it just says something like âMore research is needed.â Which is stale but more objective, i guess đ.
