this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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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.