What do you feel about scientific jargon? Writers chime in.
Have you ever tried to pick up a scientific article and gotten lost in the jargon? Or, perhaps, gone to a seminar by a scientist who is not in your field and felt inundated by the heaps of new terminology? We asked our writers to share some anecdotes from their experiences with scientific jargon.
Here are their responses:
Yateendra Joshi, Writer, Editage Insights
On Justification: I remember someone who took a project proposal to his boss. The boss said, “I will not even look at it unless you can justify it.” In all seriousness, the author came back to our editorial unit and
asked that the text be set with full justification.
On Wooden Shoelaces: In editing a table on how much wood is required for different uses (furniture, railway sleepers, etc.),
one row showed the quantity required for shoelaces. Upon querying the author, I was told that the
table had been reproduced exactly from the original source (in other words, I should shut up). The penny dropped a couple of days later: the original ought to have been shoe lasts, which are shoe-shaped wooden blocks, which are used for shaping shoes. The author remained grateful to me forever. My guess was the author simply instructed his secretary to retype the table from the original and incorporated it into the article without cross-checking the re-typed version against the original. Such cross-checking is essential, especially in compiling databases.
On Mistaken Identity: I remember seeing letters addressed to Mr. D S Block (because the mailing address of where I used to work was T E R I, Darbari Seth Block, India Habitat Centre). The block is named after the founder of TERI!
Sunaina Singh, Ph.D., Writer, Editage insights
There’s a dipteran in my (alphabet) soup!
I remain clueless about business jargon, while my husband, a marketing professional, spouts it naturally all the time. Often, at gatherings with his colleagues or business school alumni, I hear TLAs (er… “three-letter acronyms”) being thrown around. I simply gawk at PNL, ROI, PBT (or do a quick Google search). I know they are not being pretentious or trying to exclude life science nerds like me from their conversations. It’s just easier and faster for them when communicating (imagine saying “profit and loss,” “return on investment,” and “profit before tax” numerous times while deep in conversation!). All that may be alphabet soup to me, but if I were to remark, “That fifth instar larva of Papilio polytes has defoliated your Murraya koenigii,” they’d be gawking at me!
Jokes on conversational jargon apart, is jargon a complete no-no in academic writing?
Photographic evidence of a fifth instar larva of Papilio polytes defoliating my Murraya koenigii
If your article targets specialists in your discipline, you may use field-specific jargon and acronyms. It is, however, best to avoid jargon if there is a better and clearer way to express the same thing. In your abstract especially, you should avoid needlessly complicated language and abbreviations if you want a wider readership. And I don’t just mean laypersons—you also want your article to be appreciated by scientists from diverse academic fields.
I want to talk about field-specific abbreviations in particular. Did you know that acronyms can have different meanings depending on the context? See below:
CI: confidence interval, chief investigator, common interface
RPM: reads per million mapped reads, revolutions per minute
WTF: water-soluble thiourea-formaldehyde.
Therefore, try to avoid using acronyms when:
- The acronym can be easily confused
- The term is used just once or twice in the entire manuscript
- The term comprises just one or two words.
To minimize jargon in academic writing, understand your audience and tailor the use of highly technical language accordingly (is it a plain language summary, popular science article, article for a multidisciplinary journal, or article for a journal in a niche field?). And if you have no other way but to use technical terms or acronyms, make sure to define them.
I leave you with a fun challenge, created by a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute, to express your research simply: https://splasho.com/upgoer5/!
Radhika Vaishnav, Ph.D., Manager, Content and Editorial, Editage Insights.
"Elite Ology"
As Molecular Biology picked up as an exciting new field in the 90's and 2000's, one wonders if the jargon was not a huge part of the magnetism. After all, one look at the textbooks back then with thousand-plus pages of Ps, Qs, ATCGs and m-, t-, r- mi- RNAs was enough to make one feel an inflated sense of brilliance ("I understand this stuff - I must be smart"!)
I started with my research training on pRb and p53, and other cool-sounding alphanumericals like p202, MLL2, and Notch1, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that once you dig deep into the workings of one of these, you learn a language that almost no one on the planet will speak or understand. Truly, the rarer the molecule ("only one lab studying it in the world"), the "cooler” it seemed!
It was truly an era of feeling like a queen among proteins and genes! Of course, today, this information is easily accessible to all - and we are in an equitable information world of Ps, Qs and ATCGs - making Molecular jargon no longer an ivory tower secret buried amongst thousand of textbook and journal pages!
David Burbridge, Writer, Editage Insights.
The Case of the Baffling Acronym
I think it would be fair to say that I have a love-hate relationship with acronyms. They're useful for avoiding repeating yourself too much or just saving your fingers some typing—After all, would you rather type GAPDH or glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase?
But in some cases, acronyms can just create more work for the reader. I recently had a manuscript where I saw the same acronym several times—DLPD. If the same acronym shows up a lot then it’s not a problem, since acronyms are supposed to save space; however, the issue was that the author had neglected to define the acronym, and I was unsure of its meaning. It also wasn't the main topic of the paper, so it was hard to figure it out from the context. This is also a common challenge, so I did what I usually do and looked it up on Google, only to find a lot of irrelevant pages. Something about distance learning programs in India? The Detroit Lakes Police Department? It can't be those... It also doesn’t seem to be a gene based on the context; they said “suffering from DLPD,” so it has to be a disease. Let's check Pubmed...
And voilà. It was a typo that hadn’t appeared just once, but many times throughout the document. They had meant to say diffuse parenchymal lung disease: DPLD. And what do you know? Lots of other researchers had made the same mistake; what's more, it looks like it slipped through the review and proofreading processes of several journals! With this new knowledge, I now understood the mysterious acronym and was able to fix the manuscript.
This story goes to show two things: First, it's always worth explaining your acronym if there is any possible doubt as to what it means. Second, check your acronyms carefully, and fix any problems AASP. Sorry, I meant ASAP.
Hope you enjoyed the article. What are some memorable scientific jargon stories you have encountered?
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