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Jargonness

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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

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ 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.