Jargon (was Re: Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files)

[Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>]

Geoff Hart wrote:
> <<BTW, what is this genre you mention? Is it an abstract technical  
> communicator thing?>>
>
> Easy enough to find in any dictionary, but for those who don't have  
> one handy: a genre is nothing more complex than a group  of related  
> topics. Literature is one genre, computer documentation another,  
> history yet another.
>   

I hope I have enough dictionaries that no one feels they need to look 
words up for me :-)

This is probably going to sound pedantic (getting that out of the way), 
but I just wasn't sure if you were using "genre" in some new stilted or 
expanded sense that is specific to the wider theory of technical 
communications. I never know, maybe I need to look for a canonical 
glossary of jargon for the supergenre (technical communications).

I want to explore some new ground: I detect a dark star lurking at the 
center of our sense of what is jargon. The word jargon can be defined 
across a pretty darned huge conceptual range, so I don't think it has 
much utility, even as one of the individual definitions, to a tech 
writer. Sure, anyone of us could recite all the conventional wisdom you 
could want about why jargon is supposed to be a problem for us, but when 
I think about it, I don't imagine very many of us have much use for 
conventional definitions of jargon--it means that scientific vocabulary 
or specialized notational language is jargon, for example. Working tech 
writers assimilate new technical vocabulary, even LOTS of it, with every 
job or project change. Most of it is technical, and I can't remember the 
last time that any purpose of mine was served by calling it jargon.

The argument, so it goes, is that jargon isn't a problem for technical 
writers, it is a problem for the audience. I still have a problem with 
jargon in this sense. I expect that the majority of what we filter out 
of documentation as jargon is actually not about the words at all. It is 
rather about the concepts underlying the words. "They don't need to know 
about this. It is too jargon-y." It would be the same problem even if 
the word was familiar.

Interesting Wikipedia links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Have fun.

Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com







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