Eliminating Ambiguous Words

Eliminating Ambiguous Words

It is important to realize that different words can mean different things in certain contexts, and because science is a subject that inherently uses a lot of jargon, this can be a real problem. A word (or phrase) is ‘ambiguous’ if it could potentially mean different things to different people.

For example, the statement that ‘Male salmon grew frighteningly quickly’ could mean they grew much more quickly than expected, or that you were actually scared by their speed of growth. Similarly, the statement that ‘these males grew significantly faster than females’ is also potentially problematic because ‘significance’ means something different when it refers to a statistical comparison than when it is used to convey something noticeable; so, a scientific audience and a non-scientific audience might interpret the meaning very differently.