Jargon

[Ela]

Pet peeve rising to the top: When people write articles to explain science to non-scientists and fill the article with jargon.

Define your jargon, folks.

Give a clear and understandable definition of your science-y term so the non-scientist will grasp what you're talking about instead of zoning out in the first paragraph cause you might as well be writing in a foreign language as far as they're concerned.

Numerous people have reviewed the articles in question before I got to them and not one of them has asked for or offered definitions for the jargon. Cause if they understand it, they assume everyone else does, too, right?    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[rivka]

Pet peeve rising to the top: When people write articles to explain science to non-scientists and fill the article with jargon.

Define your jargon, folks.

100% agree. Science articles for the layperson written as though they were for folks in the industry bug me too. Maybe (depending on just how specific the jargon is) I can understand them, but it means I can't pass them around to non-tech folks, as I would often do if they were written properly.

[Jonathon]

Steven Pinker addresses this problem in his book The Sense of Style. He calls it "the curse of knowledge". Once you know a field and know how to talk about it to other insiders, it's hard to step outside of that and think of how to talk about it to people who aren't insiders.

[Ela]

Yup, that's exactly the problem, Jonathon.

You get so used to speaking about subjects in a certain way, you forget that the whole world doesn't understand what you're talking about.

I think it dawned on me in my own family, when I realized that other families don't talk about the things we spoke about regularly, and often wouldn't even understand what we talk about.

[rivka]

when I realized that other families don't talk about the things we spoke about regularly, and often wouldn't even understand what we talk about.

This is actually something that was driven home to me in high school. ("Wait, you talked about what at the dinner table?" "Why, don't you?") But it's easy to forget, so I've had reminders many times since.

[Ela]

Yeah, exactly, rivka.