Scientific jargon

This job has nothing if not variety. While waiting for a computer tech-book chapter to come in tonight, I edited an article for a scientific journal, about rain-forest destruction in the Amazon. It was a fine article, but I was struck (not for the first time) by how specialists obscure meaning with jargon.

Here's the case in point (although I don't think I can produce superscript numbers and will have to improvise). The writer wanted to say that the world's forests are shrinking at a rate of 135,000 square kilometers a year. At least I think that's what she meant. But instead of saying this, she wrote 1.3 times 10 to the fifth power by kilometers squared. In print it came out something like 1.3 x 10(5) km (2).

This is shorthand, and I'm well aware that scientists can read the notation above easily. Shorthand can serve a useful purpose, as when paleogeologists use kyr to indicate 1,000 years; otherwise the unimaginable times they deal with would become hard to read.

But there's nothing hard to read about 135,000 square kilometers, and using a complex notation smacks of a desire to obscure. If rain-forest destruction is to be slowed, it won't be by making the subject hard for ordinary readers to understand.