Explaining science is a tricky business. You have to use the right words to be accurate, and you have to assume that your audience may never have heard those words. Recently, I was invited by the nonprofit Science on Tap to talk about simplifying language for an audience at the Pub at Third Place in Seattle. I also will give a talk at the Seattle Aquarium on some of the same ideas.

Maybe you are a newcomer to the idea of the Up Goer language, created by Randall Munroe. But I’ve written about it before, and so you can get some background on that language and why scientists use it by reading an earlier post of mine about Hair-Having animals and a later discussion based on a talk at Town Hall.

What I’d like to share here are some links for exploration on your own of Up Goer, as well as other ways that people have used to try to simplify science communication.

Here is an especially wonderful comment from Chris Rowan’s article linked below:

“Some might not see this as anything more than a gimmick, and argue that the constraints you are forced to work under are too severe; that by replacing jargon with a dense thicket of ‘simple’ words, you are just replacing one sort of linguistic complexity with another.” But, as he says, that’s missing the point.  Rewriting in Up Goer can bring something “quite profound.”

Scientific American magazine article

Text editor to use upgoer yourself

Original cartoon about Saturn V rocket

Blog from Forum on Science Ethics and Policy that sponsors UW contest. This contains excerpts from some of the wonderful entries by contestants who described their research using Up Goer.

Different gizmo for simplifying text

Alternate text editor – By Theo Sanderson who created Upgoer5, Upgoer6

In Theo’s version Six, your text gets analyzed so that you can use more than the 1,000 most common words in English, but the words are sorted by color according to where they fall on the most-common to least-common continuum.