Jargon and science communication
Jargonness 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. It is expressed mathematically as:formula_1
In the above equation, formula_2 stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus and formula_3 stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus.
Method of use.
Both the frequencies (formula_2 and formula_3) 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. 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:
References.
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