Jargon-a Regret This

I've been sharing a lot of my perspectives on writing sci-fi over the past month, and today we're going to continue that trend by talking about everyone's favorite trope; spitting jargon.

The title of this post is more than just an incredible pun, though yes, yes, you can stop applauding, I know it's an incredible pun. The fact is that as much as I myself love fictional technology, I recognize that any sci-fi that relies on its audience to read and remember technical manuals for space ships is going to find itself, well... without an audience. That doesn't mean you can't write the technical manual though Mike. In fact please do. Just don't try to shove every term into every episode.

There's a video I recall from quite some time ago that does a good job of displaying how to do this exactly wrong. If you watch it you'll probably fall into one of two camps; you know a bit about computer infrastructure, or any conversation about binary data may as well be Greek to you (assuming you don't speak Greek). If you're in the first camp, you'll be able to tell that every term he's using is made up, and the video probably comes off as really dry absurdist humor. If you're in the second camp, you're just confused.

And that's the issue with jargon. You can play it for laughs, and you can use it seriously, but either way the more of it there is, the more that second half of your audience is just going to be lost. This applies to fantasy writing as well, in fact, making up new names for stuff like plants, animals, and weapons that totally have names in the real world is just going to needlessly confuse your readers and throw them out of the story. Unless your horses are really only distantly based on actual horses, just call a horse a horse. Making up names for things that just absolutely do not exist in our world or existing fiction is obviously fine, but if Brandon Sanderson can call a magical living bladed weapon a sword, so can you.

Overuse of jargon can crop up in pretty much any genre, really. It's a common trope and is therefore to be avoided.

Right?

Obviously not. It's something you should be aware of, and much as with anything else in writing, can be a tool in trying to achieve certain aims. Jargon is absolutely a thing that exists in real life, so to have secondary world fiction completely free of its own unique jargon would feel... well, as if it were a pale imitation of the real world. So how do you use jargon to effectively flesh out your world without automatically alienating half of your potential audience? To answer that question I'm actually going to turn to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote the following in the introduction to A Brief History of Time.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers.

He then proceeds to do something remarkable in writing a book that explains some of the most difficult to grasp concepts in physics in a way that a novice could understand. A Brief History of Time is not for everyone, of course. The subject matter is very dry, and as lively as the presentation is, most people will balk at the fact that there is no story and the volume is essentially just a particularly well-written textbook. But the fact remains that Hawking produced a jargon-leaden book and managed to make it readable by just about anyone with a high-school literacy, selling millions of copies across a dozen reprints in the process.

So what do we learn from this? Simple; if you're going to use jargon, define it.

See, there's this thing that happens in Star Trek basically all the time that people like to make fun of. When facing some kind of catastrophic danger to the ship one of the more technical members of the crew will suggest something like "If we can re-route engine power through the primary weapons and configure them to Melllvar's frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure!" and then someone less technical will respond with "Like putting too much air in a balloon!"

Wait, sorry, that's the episode of Futurama parodying Star Trek.

So maybe Trek is a little too obvious about playing this hand, but that does make it easy to use as an illustration here. Re-routing engine power through the weapons to convert them to a different frequency in order to overload an electro-quantum structure is straight gibberish. In the case of that Futurama quote it's literal gibberish, but even in shows like Star Trek TNG that have a technical manual blessed by the producers, re-routing plasma from the impulse engines to strengthen the structural integrity field (or something of that ilk) is going to play like gibberish to the vast majority of viewers.

So you have another character, perhaps somebody who, like the audience, doesn't quite understand what's going on, have an epiphany they can sum up with a simile or metaphor. "Oooh, this thing you're suggesting would be sorta like popping a balloon by over-inflating it! Perfect!" Does it match up with the jargon? Maybe. Does it help the audience understand what's going on?

Yes. And that's why it happens. If you're not writing the last five-minutes of a 43 minute long TV episode, I'd recommend you don't make the metaphor quite so... obvious. But don't be afraid to explain the jargon to your readers. Don't get lost in the weeds of "but everybody in this world just knows that's how it is, they wouldn't try to explain it." You may be right. And your dedicated audience members may very well be able to suss out the meaning via context clues given enough time. But in the mean time half of your potential audience has noped out the front door, leaving your book comfortably shelved.

Subtlety is good, yes. Be subtle and natural if you can. But you'd rather have everyone think your explanation of why hitting the dragon with a bale of flowers knocked it out (so basically really bad hay fever?) was a little on-the-nose than having half of them just put the book down and leave because they didn't understand what Floro-dragoneisis was.

Speaking from the weirdest side of experience here.