Introduction
Advancing health equity and racial and Indigenous justice requires convincing broad, diverse audiences to work together to disrupt the current systems and structures. Changing minds and driving people to action requires communicating with these audiences in engaging, accessible, and impactful ways. As author Phil Simon shares in the below video, communication is rooted in developing a shared understanding and many of us are hindered by the “curse of knowledge.” Many of us fall into the all too common trap of using jargon, or the special language of a particular activity or group. He recommends using the simplest words possible when communicating with a diverse group of people. In this blog, we’ll share with you some tactics you can use to reduce jargon in your communications.
Examples
There is not a set of words that are inherently jargon. It is important to reiterate the point that it is NOT jargon if everyone in the group has a shared understanding of the terms. For example, if you’re a sports fan, terms like hail mary, hat trick, or par for the course likely make perfect sense to you. If you don’t follow sports, you’re probably googling those terms right now. In research, jargon can include myriad terms and phrases such as intervention, mixed-methods, quasi-experimental, confounders, subpopulations, confidence intervals, saturation, etc. When sharing findings with broader and more diverse audiences it is important to consider whether everyone has a shared understanding of the terminology.
Tips for Identifying and Reducing Jargon
Write it Out
Write down what you are planning to share, whether it’s to be shared in writing or some other form of communication. Critically review the words, highlighting any acronyms or words with three or more syllables.
Use a Readability Tool
There are multiple online tools to assess the readability, the ease of reading and the level of formal education an individual may need to understand your writing. Many will even flag the higher-level, challenging terms. Microsoft Office also has a built-in tool with the ability to flag jargon and gauge readability. Grammarly, which some organizations offer for their employees, also assesses readability and can flag individual words.
Add a Reviewer
Ask people outside of your particular area of expertise to review what you’ve written up and flag words or phrases they do not understand or find challenging. This could include students, friends, neighbors, social media followers, or individuals within your organization in different roles: finance teams, human resources, project assistants or managers, administrators, etc.
Finding Alternatives
Once you have identified words or phrases, the simplest tools to find alternatives are dictionaries and thesauri. Merriam-Webster has kid’s definitions for most words, which can be an incredibly useful tool.
Briefly, here is an example from an academic journal article.
A novel exercise intervention model that combines traditional exercise with gamification and social incentives theory shows improved outcomesfor a subpopulation of obese adolescents.
This description might be fine for an academic journal, but if the information is being presented to a parent teacher student association it needs some reworking. Let’s take a look at each of these words. Novel is just a fancy way of saying new, so that is an easy swap. When it comes to intervention, this can be explained as trying to change something on purpose. Traditional is not necessarily jargon, but is flagged due to a lack of clarity around what it means in this context. What is considered traditional exercise can vary a lot based on individual knowledge and experience. Gamification means turning something into a game. The name of any specific theory is likely jargon. In this case,social incentives theory is giving rewards or prizes for desired behaviors. Outcomes are what happened, what things improved, what things did not. Subpopulation can be described as a small group of people within a larger group. Adolescents can be described as young people, or more specifically whatever age range of individuals participated in the study.
Let’s take a look at what the de-jargoned version might look like:
We found that a new program that makes exercise into a game and provides rewards for participation can help some obese kids aged 12 - 17 improve their health.
This may need additional tweaking, but it’s a great place to start.
Conclusions
Driving positive change requires communicating with individuals using words and phrases everyone understands. Just swapping out the words or phrases does not mean the work is over - there’s more to effective communication than just de-jargoning your message. But identifying and replacing jargon is a great place to start, and these tips can be incorporated into current processes and workflows used to develop any communication materials associated with your research project.