The saddest part is that academics don’t like obscure language either. No one does. They use it either because they have to or because they feel they have to.
academic jargon
Submitted 1 day ago by gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/bcb4e08f-ecaf-47ec-9e8f-9e413981faad.jpeg
Comments
ytg@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
HarneyToker@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Tbh, the jargon is probably clearer than the translation is. You just need to learn what words mean.
mmmm@sopuli.xyz 1 day 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 1 day 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.
Donkter@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Eq0@literature.cafe 1 day 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.
sneekee_snek_17@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“How to write consistently boring scientific literature” by Kaj Sand-Jensen is a good, quick read
Nothing groundbreaking, but fun
Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Nothing worse than legal jargon
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
There’s the misunderstanding tjat a summary must compress as much info in as few sentences as possible. But it just needs to give a quick overfiew.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Hot take: Calvin and Hobbes is pretty cringe and stupid and this comic exemplifies why
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You were right about one thing: that is a legitimately hot take
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I don’t think it does.
There, we both said as much.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ChatGPT at home
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
Hrmm.
I’m not an academic. I’m an engineer. I’m guessing academic jargon is similar to technical jargon.
Yesterday I heard the price of “memory” was going up and was left to wonder if that is RAM, SSD, HDD, EEPROM, FRAM, NOR data flash, …
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To be clear, most scientists struggle with reading many papers. So it’s not a problem with technical specificity, it’s a problem with fundamentally bad writing.
In science, unparseable writing mainly comes from the fact that people aren’t told that you need to prioritize being clear. It’s the principle behind the curse of knowledge - it’s easy to forget that people don’t know what you know and don’t think the way you think. So you end up writing in a way that only you can interpret. It takes extra effort and time to read back what you wrote and think about how other people might understand what you wrote. But that’s time that a grad student could otherwise spend being further exploited, so QA ends up falling to the wayside
cosmos8188@leminal.space 1 day ago
Thats true, the whole system of writing is poorly taught. The purpose of writing is to convay the meaning in a suitable manner - but, what exactly is a suitable manner? Well that depends on a variety of factors such as the intended audience, subject, purpose of writing, technicality, etc. There just isn’t a singular lexicon (dictionary) - as such, reverting back to more generally known words is better design than using unrelated lexicons.
In addition, general lexicons may have issues with ambiguity. But they also can be explicitly defined using contextual cues. The point in writing is so its understandable not extravagant.
ieightpi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah I get that people can get defensive when they are overwhelmed by jargon, but thats the beauty of language. We have so many different words that means such complex things. Its what allowed us to keep developing technology based on the layer below it. People need to get over not understanding every single word in a scientist paper, as if it’s an attack on their intelligence.
And hell I know AI gets alot of hate on Lemmy but that shit is very good at helping break down complex scientific papers with the jargon. I work in medical research and the amount of time it’s saved by helping me understand the jargon has been immense.
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
I’m not going to jump down your throat for suggesting AI, but I’ll mention that Wikipedia often has a “Simple English” link in the Languages section that’s a godsend for ESL people and scientific/academic subjects for lay people.
PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Honestly, as it relates to academics and papers, psychology isn’t too bad from what I’ve read. There are wildly varying definitions, but papers have had ways to account for that for decades - that being defining terms where needed, and showing your work so others can see the context. For example, if studying depression, they’ll have to specify which scale or metric was used for depression in patients, be it a mood tracker, or a standardize questionnaire. That said, you could always tell when a paper wasn’t well constructed or had little to offer, because thats when the jargon would be front and centre.
That, and more purely academic papers. They were awful. For example, reading a thirteen-page paper that could wholly be summarised as “Positionality is how people define themselves relative to others. They may have biases based on these definitions.” but written like, “subject-position is based on a subject’s temporal elements to best target the dominant drive in a social confrontation…” I have no problem reading most articles, but those were putting me to sleep.