Someone responded to my "minimize jargon" post to this list yesterday with a query, saying "how do you know it is jargon?" (I paraphrase.) As I am teaching a writing workshop tomorrow, this caught my interest. My initial thoughts are that there are at a minimum 3 different kinds of writing. 1. Within your discipline (or sub-discipline) where commonly-known jargon is not permissible, but useful shorthands. For example, almost all of us should know what IM, CMC or CSCW are. In social network analysis, we all know what blockmodeling or degree are. 2. Across disciplines to intelligent readers, such as the Association of Internet RESEARCHERS: I would never use "blockmodeling" or "degree" without defining. Just as I would never use "performativity" or "performing gender". They are in-group terms. (Test for this: ask your [hetero?] partner tonight if s/he wants to "perform gender" and see what you get). OTOH, I would assume I could talk about regression coefficents or significance tests on this list, because they are common terms in all social sciences. AOIR has a special problem in this respect, because we reach into the humanities, which, for example, normally doesn't teach a basic stats course. (And of course, OTOH is a jargon term I assume is commonly understood.) 3. For intelligent readers in the general public -- basically those who read Harpers, LeMonde, etc. You really have to avoid jargon here. I've doing a fair amount of this writing. See my piece for "revolver" on my website and the recently coauthored Pew Internet report, "The Strength of Ties" (www.pewinternet.org). Trouble is, many of us don't recognize jargon when we "perform scholarly writing" ;-). This really hit home around Christmas, when after I had tried my best, the Pew folks edited my writing for the aforementioned general public. (BTW, Pew goes to a great deal of trouble to make stuff readable -- a 1.5 page press release which is all that many commentators [especially bloggers and news media] appear to have read; a 9 pp. summary, and then the fat report itself.) 4. Of course there is a 4th level, for the remainder of the general public. That is really hard. 5. Also hard is writing in a foreign language, and even harder, using foreign norms for constructing papers/chapters. Which basically means writing/thinking in American English.* I'm intrigued that a Portuguese university has invited me to teach in June a workshop on this stuff. (*Linguisitic imperialism is a whole other topic.) PS: An amusing piece of ageist writing is getting edited out of a paper that Jennifer Kayahara and I are writing, "Searching for Leisure". The editor has asked that we take out the term "MacGyver" on the grounds that young scholars would be unaware of that great 1985+ TV show where Richard Dean Anderson saved himself weekly from dire situations by do-it-yourself tricks. If you're under 40, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088559/ Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________