When I was in CÉGEP, I had to take a couple of complementary courses to get my degree. Due to the way my schedule was structured, I basically had no choice but to join a social science class. I’ve written about this class before, but there’s one thing that I have to repeat: I am not a social scientist, which means my lack of interest in the subject did not help for the boredom I experienced.

As far as I can remember, my goal for any test is to get a perfect score.

When communicating, there is always this fine balance to be struck between adding enough technical jargon and terms to be precise, while at the same time not overdoing it to the point that a reader has to have a dictionary beside them in order to understand what they are reading. The worst feeling I’ve ever had while reading is going through a paragraph and not even being able to grasp anything that the author is saying. This is a pretty big sign that something has gone wrong. Science is a big culprit for these kinds of errors. Some articles are way too technical, while others are so empty that they are like husks of corpses, barely the thing the author wanted to communicate.

I’ve long been a proponent of using analogies while discussing concepts that are highly abstract or technical. They allow one to understand what an expert is saying without necessarily having to learn all the background information required to truly understand.