Jargon on Academic Websites

Help! What should we do about jargon?

Jargon and academia often go hand-in-hand, and it’s important to understand the nuance of what jargon is and when to address it before diving in to any jargon remediations. If you are very familiar with remediating jargon, however, please skip to “Should I Remediate All Jargon?” for our recommendations on what to prioritize.

Remediating Jargon

jargon (jar·​gon)

  • the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group – “sports jargon”
  • obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions (the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea) and long words – “an academic essay filled with jargon”

Success Criterion 3.1.3 Unusual Words (Level AAA)

“A mechanism is available for identifying specific definitions of words or phrases used in an unusual or restricted way*, including idioms and jargon**”

*words used in such a way that requires users to know exactly which definition to apply in order to understand the content correctly

**words used in a particular way by people in a particular field

Success Criterion 3.1.5 Reading Level (Level AAA)

“When text requires reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level after removal of proper names and titles, supplemental content, or a version that does not require reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level, is available.”

 

What you might hear if you bring up jargon in higher education….

  • Jargon is WCAG level AAA, so considered “best practice” (aka technically optional for the current federal mandate)
  • This is higher education, you’re asking me to water it down
  • The technical terminology is required/essential to understanding the research
  • This was meant for other faculty within this specific discipline

A bonus and often unspoken or implied reason…

  • My research has to sound impressive so I can get (grant money / promotion and tenure / the respect of my colleagues)

Who does this impact?

Audience members with hidden disabilities – particularly cognitive or neurodivergent

Some quick examples:

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can make processing large amounts or very technical information more difficult

ADHD or autism can make processing new or large words difficult

Dyslexia can make it difficult to read when there is a lot of unknown or large words

Who else does this impact?

As we know, accessibility is for everyone. So who else benefits from a reduction in jargon?

  • Students (disabled students, but also students deciding what discipline to study)
  • Children and teenagers (specifically minoritized children/teens who have been told higher education is not for them)
  • Academics in other disciplines (grant, award, and conference committees are often interdisciplinary; IRB reviews are often done by broad discipline vs specific specialty reviewers)
  • Everyone: is knowledge for the benefit of all, or not?

How to have this discussion

How can we communicate the importance of this to faculty and staff who are publishing content about their research or the department online?

  • Start by asking questions: Who do you know reads your content? Who do you imagine or hope reads your content? Who is it possible is reading your content?
  • Start small: Some change is always better than no change. Instead of requiring all jargon to be remediated right off the bat, can we compromise on anything being emailed? Content living on the home page?
  • Where possible/needed, go to the source: Some faculty can be very particular, and it may be putting staff in a difficult position to ask them to remediate jargon in or about faculty’s work. Instead, involve the faculty member directly in the conversation – or offer to do a workshop for the whole department on the topic.

What does this look like in practice?

Options for remediation:

  • Remove jargon and rewrite to a lower reading level
  • Offer definitions or explanations for specific words or phrases
  • Offer a “lay” version of the original text

These can all be used together, there is no “pick one” requirement.

Original text: “Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation’s attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national permanence. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and incongruous as the collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared origin story, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape.”

Source: Lindsay DiCuirci

Remediated text: “Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians (those who collect or study relics or monuments from ancient times), bibliophiles (book lovers), amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation’s attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from being destroyed were often reprinted to avoid future loss and reinforce a sense of national identity. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and conflicting as the collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared origin story, historical reprints testified to the rooted regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape.”

Remediation:

  • offers definitions for two jargon words important to keep for the context of the paragraph (antiquarians, bibliophiles)
  • replaces the rest of the words with more common synonyms

No meaning was lost in the remediation, and the remediated version is now accessible and available to a wider audience who may be interested in this work

Original text: “UMBC CSEE Assistant Professor Roberto Yus received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award to support his research on democratizing the Internet of Things (IoT) by introducing a semantic abstraction framework that hides the complexity of raw sensor data. While IoT devices collect vast amounts of valuable data, most organizations struggle to use it because transforming raw readings into actionable insights requires deep technical expertise in sensor selection and AI modeling. To bridge this gap, his research enables users to directly query high-level concepts, such as occupancy or energy consumption, while the computer system automatically manages the underlying sensors, machine learning models, and data pipelines to find the answers.”

Source: Prof. Roberto Yus receives NSF CAREER award: Towards a Sensorless Internet of Things through Sensor Data Management Abstraction

Additional lay text: “The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the billions of sensors and connected devices embedded in buildings, factories, hospitals, and cities that continuously collect data about the world around us. Despite the enormous potential of this data to improve how we manage energy, monitor public health, and run our industries, most organizations struggle to make use of it. The reason is that turning raw sensor readings into useful answers requires deep technical expertise. This includes knowing which sensors to consult, which AI models to apply, and how to combine everything correctly. This project addresses this challenge by developing a new approach that allows anyone to simply ask what they want to know (e.g., “which rooms were underused last month and how much energy did they consume?”) while the computer system intelligently figures out how to find the answer. By hiding the complexity of sensors, this work has the potential to make the benefits of IoT technology to a much wider range of Americans, including educators, building managers, public health officials, and factory operators, through data management and artificial intelligence.”

This text was pulled directly from the NSF Award Details!

Remediation: includes an additional paragraph of lay explanation

This could be included as a labeled additional paragraph on a news post – the framing can vary depending on needs and intended audience:

  • Lay explanation or lay abstract
  • Plain language explanation
  • Non-expert explanation

In this case (chosen because it happened to be at the top of their news!) this text was already available, I did not have to write this. While it is not labeled as a “lay abstract” in the NSF details, there are two paragraphs in the abstract: the first, in plain language, and the second, in much more technical language.

Should I Remediate All Jargon?

Jargon is everywhere in academia! First, it’s important to prioritize what to address based on the following criteria:

  1. Is this a primary page of my website (the home page, an “about” page, a top-level navigation page)?
  2. Is this a page that has important information for prospective or current students?
  3. How many people will view or access this page? Is this a page that receives a high volume of my website’s traffic? (Site admins for a Sites@UMBC website can view Google analytics to check their site traffic!)

We recommend creating a plan to handle jargon one page at a time, prioritizing primary, high-traffic pages first. At this point in UMBC’s remediation process, we recommend de-prioritizing pages are not also primary, student-facing or high traffic pages that:

  • are about individual faculty members or their research history
  • are small news updates about upcoming or newly released research (large feature articles or very important research breakthroughs should be considered for jargon!)
  • contain research abstracts or book summaries submitted for a specific purpose (e.g., for conferences, panel talks, lectures, etc)
    • we recommend updating submission requirements to include a required lay abstract/summary in addition to the standard abstract/summary

Final Remarks

  • Lay abstracts are becoming more and more commonplace required parts of applications for journal publications and grants
  • Remediating jargon as it is discovered is important
  • Proactive strategy for improving the culture around jargon:
    • Talk about it in the same way and at the same time we talk about alt text – grouping writing-related topics together
    • Host workshops for key campus partners to begin to shift university strategy – communications and marketing, academic affairs, research & creative achievement
    • Host workshops for academic departments
  • The reduction of jargon improves access to research and higher education…
    • for disabled people who deserve and have a right to equal access of information
    • across disciplines, allowing for more opportunities for interdisciplinary research to occur
    • for k-12 students interacting with UMBC who are unsure about if they have a future in higher education and if college is “meant for them”
    • for current UMBC students who are intimidated by the prospect of research or are unsure if they are “cut out” for a specific academic discipline
    • for the general public and the court of public opinion of whether or not higher education is relevant and necessary to the average person, which can influence how many tax dollars are spent on research

Additional Resources and Further Reading