Yeah that chemistry/physics example at the end of the OP is dog shit as an example. The summary butchers a lot of the actual meaning and if anything makes some of it more vague.
Comment on academic jargon
HarneyToker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Tbh, the jargon is probably clearer than the translation is. You just need to learn what words mean.
Donkter@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Eq0@literature.cafe 3 weeks ago
The jargon is precise, the translation can provide intuition. You often need both to get the full depth of a concept across. Good academic communication should be a mix of both, with introductions/overviews/conclusions/remarks interspersed along the way to help and conduct the reader, while the precise elements are also given in parallel to explain the technical aspects. Often in presentations the hardest bit is determining the level of precision that is expected by the audience. And usually, the format is intuition first, precise, jargon-heavy details afterwards.
mmmm@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Maybe the cognitive load for reading jargon (and looking up each word you don’t know its meaning each time you stumble upon them) is higher than when reading text written in simple language
HarneyToker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Possibly, but I’m pretty sure the “translation” doesn’t actually mean anything while the technical jargon is actually telling you something. What does an ion being “floofier” even mean? If I’m trying to communicate something about ions to someone and I’m “translating”, I’ll need to translate multiple times and ways to make it make sense to multiple people, when the listener could go look up the technical jargon themselves and get the idea of the statement.
Technical jargon exists for a reason, it is truly simpler than using ambiguous language because you don’t need to keep explaining yourself to get one concept across.