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academic jargon
(lemmy.nz)
here's your monthly (/ yearly) reminder to use simple language wherever possible.
bonus content:
Tbh, the jargon is probably clearer than the translation is. You just need to learn what words mean.
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.
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
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. Complicated concepts need very specific words, can’t always use 5th grade reading level material.
You know, I have a PhD in chemistry. I started off trying to explain what "floofier" means in ELI5, but honestly, I can't. Not without writing several pages, diving deeper and deeper.
In this case, it is the nephelauxetic effect, which literally translates to "cloud expanding". But that's not an accurate translation either, because it's only a very specific bit of the electron cloud for a specific ion in a specific spot in a molecule.
There are at least half a dozen ways to make an ion "floofier" that don't apply here and/or wouldn't be paper worthy at all.
I had a customer that didn't want to accept that I made a change to fix an issue with the simple explanation and demanded to know exactly what changed. He told me to shut up and just do the change before I finished the first sentence with the detailed technic explanation and never asked again for details. Sometimes that's how things go.
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.