Jargon not to use blindly
Why it is important to know the meaning of the jargon you use
As a journalist I try to avoid jargon as much as possible, not that I always manage this, but I try. The reason is that jargon adds a bit of unfamiliarity to the text that makes the readers at best stumble through, at worst assign a completely different meaning to what you are saying or abandoning the article completely.
As a scientist writing for your scientific peers, it is ok to use scientific jargon. When well used, jargon can make your article quicker to read. What you first would have said with a lengthy sentence or paragraph you now mention in a single word.
This is however not a free pass to use jargon whenever you see fit. Even in scientific articles too much jargon can make an article unreadable. A lot of the reasons are the same as those I gave for the use of abbreviations.
Know the meaning
I could leave it at that, but there are however, more reasons to take a closer look at the jargon you use. That has all to do with knowing the meaning of the bit of jargon you are using.
To explain this, I take you back to my early years as a scientist. Just as I was finishing of my training the first kits came on the market. Now you have a kit for almost all standard scientific procedures. Then it was a novelty. One I was warned against. Not so much that I should not use a kit for say a DNA extraction, but more in the sense of that I should known the principles on which the kit worked.
While this might sound like a pain, knowing how and why it works helps with troubleshooting when it doesn’t work.
The same advice I give for using jargon. Make sure you know exactly what it means, which lengthy sentence or paragraph it replaces. If you can’t find a good definition, chances are that you readers don’t have one either. Then it is best not to use it.
Having its definition, and keeping this in mind while writing, also helps with using it in a sentence in a way that makes sense for the readers. The following example shows what can happen if you assign a different meaning to the jargon you use.
Example
The jargon bit I am focussing here is: amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). ASVs are bits of genome sequence that differ between organisms and that are used to identify them. In the example below they are looking at the bit of the genome that corresponds to 16S rDNA.
The first time the authors mention this bit of jargon was as follow:
“A total of 1 004 686 high-quality bacterial 16S rDNA reads were obtained, which were classified into 24 853 bacterial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs).”
So far so good.
The authors go then on to use specific ASVs as a proxy for the presence of the corresponding bacteria species. But then somehow, they start seeing ASVs as more than that. As becomes clear for the following sentence from the discussion.
“We found that overexpression of GmSPX5 altered the root and rhizosphere soil microbial community structure, represented by recruiting ASVs from Xanthomonadales, Sphingomonadales, and Burkholderiales in both roots and the rhizosphere, which exhibited significantly positive correlations with P content, AM colonization, and arbuscular colonization.”
A sentence that if you replaced the jargon for its meaning sounds quite strange. Try it replace ASVs for ‘amplicon sequence variants’ or ‘species specific 16S rDNA’
Both are not really recruitable I would say, as they stay inside the bacteria
More probable is that the species representing the specific ASVs are recruited and not the ASVs itself.
That the authors could have worded as follow
‘the presence of ASVs from Xanthomonadales, Sphingomonadales, and Burkholderiales in both roots and the rhizosphere indicates that the root and rhizosphere soil microbial community structure is altered.’
Whereby presence substitutes recruits.
Keeping the meaning of the jargon you use in mind while writing and proofreading your article can help avoiding those kinds of mistakes.
Prompt
For today’s prompt you will investigate the meaning of the jargon you often use.
Set your timer at 1 minute and write down as many jargon terms as you can think off.
Then look up the exact meaning of each term (try to do so for at least five terms).
If you can’t think of any jargon, think of which words you try to avoid when explaining your research to a high school student.
Happy writing