561
academic jargon
(lemmy.nz)
here's your monthly (/ yearly) reminder to use simple language wherever possible.
bonus content:
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
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.