The one I give students when I teach them is: Never underestimate intelligence. ALWAYS underestimate vocabulary.
People can and do want to learn about super complex topics, we just need to not lose them on the way!
This week, graduate students in my course are learning how to write about science for the non-expert public.
For those of you who do this professionally, what tips would you offer?
I remember more than a few years having problems understanding a lot of the text in an astronomy magazine. I wrote to the mag with my concerns. Received a nice reply. Afterwards the mag included a small glossary accompanying some of their more technical articles.
Counter: professionals need jargon for speed and ease and preciseness of communication.
It goes without saying that people who weaponise jargon against outsiders are garbage.
In my work in various professions, I have never found this to be true. There are abbreviations to save time, but it is generally obfuscation to show "I am smarter than you."
I’m beginning to wonder if you have a STEM qualification or have ever worked in the sector tbh. In my field an indurated volcaniclastic crystal tephra is an extremely specific description and is in no way obfuscatory.
And by extremely specific I mean the geologist who heard that sentence knows instantly what’s being described.
You think that’s obfuscation, that we’re not talking at the level of a passing layperson?
25 years teaching science at the high school and college levels, so my job was to break down the jargon into understandable English for people. I was a jargon translator.
I'm a bit of a fan of the Feynman-ish sentiment: "If you can't break it down for a layman you don't really understand it."
Worked on farms, plenty of folks that knew no English. Ain't a one that wasn't intelligent. Just a limited vocab in my preferred language.
(If anything, I expect general public reading an article are *more* likely to engage with and be interested in whatever cool thing than students in a 100 level class. The former are doing this voluntarily; the latter are probably filling a requirement being there)
This is one thing that has dismayed me, among all the other dismaying things, in recent years. WHile the govt have utterly failed to communicate on Covid, those scientists who've tried have shown themselve to be utterly inept at communicating with the public.
E.g. nosocomial vs Hospital acquired.
Yes.
At the very least we should be insisting that published scientific papers have a summary of findings.
This summary should have an expected reading level of 6th-8th grade, using commonplace vocabulary & definitions.
It would certainly clear up a lot of inaccurate reporting & bad takes.
One should eschew the logorrhea that preludes obfuscation.
Grandiloquent prolixity is the antipode, nay, the antithesis of salient cognizability.
Any perspicacious scrivener should be anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused pericombobulation through interminable prose.
This true for the non-expert public, but it’s also true for ESL experts. If English is the de facto language for scicomm, then it should be relatively simple English. I say this as someone who tends to use $10 words, and I need to get better at not doing that.
And it's hard! one of the hardest things I've ever had to write was "short technical paper at 6th grade reading level for release to the public". I communicate at that level really well face-to-face, especially if I'm allowed to be informal, but it was hard to turn off the Engineer Brain in writing.
