Editing, Succinctness, and Dealing with Jargon/Dealing with jargon

Dealing With Jargon

Science is a subject that requires you to use a certain amount of jargon, but this is potentially very problematic when you are communicating to non-specialist audiences. As a result, it is very important that you: 1) limit its use whenever possible, and 2) explain it using simple analogies (see our ‘Using Comparisons and Descriptions’ page).

Whenever possible, try not to have more than one jargon-heavy term in a single sentence, and use parentheses and abbreviations as a way of splitting up a passage of writing around these important but confusing terms. By placing the initial explanation of a term in parentheses, it forces your reader to pay special attention to it and it also sticks out from a body of text so that it is easy for your reader to skim back to it if they need to remind themselves of the explanation later on.