Jargonness
This article, Jargonness, has recently been created via the Articles for creation process. Please check to see if the reviewer has accidentally left this template after accepting the draft and take appropriate action as necessary.
Reviewer tools: Inform author |
This article, Jargonness, has recently been created via the Articles for creation process. Please check to see if the reviewer has accidentally left this template after accepting the draft and take appropriate action as necessary.
Reviewer tools: Inform author |
The jargonness equation is a piecewise mathematical function mapping the frequencies of a word's appearance in scientific and contemporary English corpora to a parameter quantifying the word's association with scientific jargon - the "jargonness" of that word[1]. It is expressed mathematically as[2]:
In the above equation, stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus and stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus.
Method of Use
Both the frequencies ( and ) must be determined and then substituted in the above equation to calculate the word's jargonness. In case a word has no mention in the general English corpus, 3 is taken as its jargonness as suggested by the second part of the equation[2]. Noticing that the logarithm in the first part of the equation is a common one (to the base 10), this simply means that the word is assumed to be a thousand times more likely to appear in a scientific text than a non-scientific one.
Examples of Corpora
The corpora that have most commonly been employed to determine the frequencies mentioned above are the following[2]:
- Professional English Research Consortium Corpus (for scientific vocabulary; 17 million words)
- British National Corpus (for common vocabulary; 97 million words)
References
- ^ Sharon, Aviv J.; Baram-Tsabari, Ayelet (January 21, 2013). "Measuring mumbo jumbo: A preliminary quantification of the use of jargon in science communication". Public Understanding of Science. 23 (5) – via SAGE journals.
- ^ a b c Willoughby, Shannon D.; LaMeres, Brock J.; Hughes, Bryce E.; Organ, Chris; Green, Jennifer L.; Sterman, Leila Belle; Davis, Kent (2018). "STEM Storytellers: Improving the Oral Communication Skills of STEM Graduate Students". monolith.asee.org. Retrieved 2023-05-06.