Communicating Technical Information Effectively

Choosing Words and Phrases So You Are Understood

Words matter. They are the most basic building blocks of written and spoken communication, and the words you choose can determine whether your audience will have a strong, concrete understanding of the research you present or will have no idea what you are trying to say and ask. Choose your words carefully – be precise and concise.

Here are a few tips to help you communicate clearly:

• Speak directly to your audience: When you use “you” to address your audience, they are more likely to understand what their role is. Using “we” to refer to your organization or study team makes you more approachable. It also makes your sentences shorter and your document easier to read. Be sure to define “you” clearly.

• Omit unnecessary words: Be concise – leave out unnecessary words. Unnecessary words waste your audience’s time. Omit information that the audience doesn’t need to know. This can be difficult for a subject matter expert, so it is important to have someone look at the information from the audience’s perspective.

• Use short, simple words: Vocabulary choice is an important part of communicating clearly. Research, clinical, and scientific writing is often stodgy, full of long, dry technical terms and other jargon. In making your word choices, pick the familiar or frequently used word over the unusual or obscure. Don’t use jargon or technical terms when everyday words have the same meaning.

• Use active voice: Active voice makes it clear who is supposed to do what. It eliminates ambiguity about responsibilities. Not “It must be done” but “You must do it.” Passive voice obscures who is responsible for what.

• In an active sentence, the person or organization that’s acting is the subject of the sentence. In a passive sentence, the person or item that is acted upon is the subject of the sentence. Passive sentences often do not identify who is performing the action.

• Use the simplest form of a verb: The simplest and strongest form of a verb is present tense. Using the present tense makes your communication more direct and less complicated. The more you use conditional or future tense, the harder your audience has to work to understand your meaning.

• Avoid hidden verbs: Use the strongest, most direct form of the verb possible. Verbs give your sentences power and direction. Too often, we hide verbs by turning them into nouns, making them less effective and using more words than we need.

• A hidden verb is a verb converted into a noun. It often needs an extra verb to make sense. So we write, “Please make an application for a transportation voucher” rather than “Please apply for a transportation voucher.”

Avoid Jargon and Use Plain Language

What do we mean by jargon?

Jargon is unnecessarily complicated, technical language used to impress, rather than to inform, your audience. When we say not to use jargon, we’re not advocating leaving out necessary technical terms; we are saying to make sure your other language is as clear as possible. Special terms can be useful shorthand within a group and may be the clearest way to communicate inside the group. However, going beyond necessary technical terms to write in jargon can cause misunderstanding or alienation, even if your only audience is other specialists.

People complain about jargon more than any other communication fault, because researchers, clinicians, and other specialists often fail to realize that terms they know well may be difficult or meaningless to their audience.

Not sure if a term is jargon or a specialist term?

If it’s in the NCI’s Cancer Dictionary (https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms) then consider using plain language from the NCI’s definition of the term in place of the term for your presentation. Below are a few examples of terms you should swap out for more accessible wording.

Jargon / Specialist Term Plain Language / Accessible Wording

Metastatic Cancer that has spread to other parts of the body

Neoadjuvant therapy

First type of cancer treatment, usually used to shrink the caner and make it easier to treat with surgery or other treatments

Malignancy Cancer or tumor

Palliative therapy

Treatments that make a patient more comfortable (but that don’t treat or cure their cancer)

Try to substitute everyday language for jargon as often as possible. Review the [VOCAB RESOURCE] at the end of this Guide document -- The plainer version conveys technical information just as accurately as and more clearly than the jargon-laden version.

If a word is central to your research and the questions you are hoping the audience can help you with, you may need to use it. It is important that it is defined early on and you may also want to use the definition interchangeably with the scientific word. For example, you define “metastatic” at the beginning of the presentation and then swap between saying “metastatic” and “cancer that has spread to other parts of the body” for the rest of the discussion.

When you have no way to express an idea except to use technical language, make sure you define your terms. However, it’s best to keep definitions to a minimum. Remember, your goal is to communicate, not to impress.

Acronyms & Abbreviations

Minimize acronyms and abbreviations: Abbreviations and acronyms were once intended to serve the audience by shortening long phrases. However, they have proliferated so much in current scientific communications that they constantly require the audience to look back to earlier pages, or to consult an appendix, to puzzle out what’s being said.

Use “nicknames”: The best solution is to find a simplified name for the entity or concept you want to abbreviate – for example, “the Cancer Center” instead of “CINJ” or “drugs that can stop growth of certain cancer cells” instead of “histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors”. This gives readers meaningful content that helps them remember what you’re talking about. It may be a bit longer, but the gain in clarity is worth it.

If you must abbreviate or use an acronym: When you are considering whether to use an abbreviation or acronym, remember that they should make it easier for your audience to understand your meaning. If they make it harder, you have failed to communicate.

When you can’t avoid them:

Always define and explain acronyms and abbreviations you have to use. Provide definitions before or when first introducing them in the presentation.

If the acronym or abbreviation includes words that are highly technical or are medical jargon, provide a plain language definition. Use the plain language definition for the rest of the discussion if possible!

Example 1: You are studying prevalence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in a specific patient population and are seeking feedback on how to handle patient consents and specimen collection. Instead of calling these BRCA1 and BRCA2 throughout your discussion, define them at the start of your talk and then, for the remainder of your talk, simply call them “the breast cancer genes we’re studying” – there’s no need to keep using the acronym when a plain language phrase is available.

Example 2: You are seeking feedback on recruitment strategies for a specific neoadjuvant chemotherapy with a clever acronym that stands for a much longer scientific description of the treatment. Define the specific therapy by name and describe how it works at the start of your presentation, then refer to it as “the first treatment we are using to shrink the tumor” in future references – in addition to avoiding repetition of an unfamiliar acronym or abbreviation, you are also avoiding medical jargon (“neoadjuvant chemotherapy”).