Jargon

There are several news services which focus on higher education and the research world which lives in it. The two leading dailies are "The Chronicle of Higher Education" and "Inside Higher-Ed". Both provide news about higher-ed policy and funding, job listings, reviews of the state of the professoriate, salary studies, research reports, and book reviews - the kind of stuff academics interested in how their institutions run might want to read.

The Chronicle this morning has a nice article by Helen Sword on academic jargon, something we occasionally shared with one another this weekend...

Jargon (from the OED):
1. The inarticulate utterance of birds, or a vocal sound resembling it; twittering, chattering.
...
3. Unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing; nonsense, gibberish. (Often a term of contempt for something the speaker does not understand.)

Sword's article, extracted from a new writing guide called 'Stylish Academic Writing', contains some very useful advice about how to test and restrain your use of jargon. You might find it a help in controlling the temptation to join your disciplinary club by aggressively excluding others with your language. She mentions George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" - famous and often discussed, you might want to be familiar with it.