JARGON POLICE: AN INTERACTIVE TOOL FOR TEACHING SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science is dedicated to training and empowering scientists to effectively communicate their science. This group combines theory and practice of science communication with improvisational theater methods and has trained over 12,000 scientists, engineers, and health professionals.

One sticking point for scientist is often jargon. Jargon exists for a reason, and in many cases can serve as an efficient means to discuss highly specialized topics within one’s own field. However, to people outside that subdicipline, jargon can be an impediment to clear communication. Most scientists all will agree that jargon should be avoided, but jargon is sneaky. While it’s easy to spot other people’s jargon, we often have difficulty recognizing it ourselves because we are too deep without our own knowledge base. Words like “climate” or “system” have different meaning to non-geologists which can unintentionally confuse audiences. This is particularly important for work in areas such as climate change or earthquake harzards, which have large societal implications.

Here we present and demonstrate a new game, JARGON POLICE, designed to get researchers out of lecture-mode and thinking about new, clever ways of describing their science in ways that connect with their audience. Come learn with us. See if you can get past the JARGON POLICE.