So today, I want to tell you about the De-Jargonizer. Which is a really interesting online tool that will help you to identify any jargon or uncommonly used words in whatever it is you're writing. That can help you figure out what you might need to change in order to write in planer clear language for audiences that may not know the particular terminology that you are used to using. So it's really simple, all you do is load in a document, you can either choose the file or add text manually, and it will highlight word by word, the words that are less commonly used in the English language. I've got a couple of examples I want us to go through today. So here's the first one. This is a paragraph from the healthy people 2020 phase one report on determinants of health. So we copy that, I'm just going do this simple text copy here. Now, we push start, and lo and behold, it's identified certain words that are really rare, and highlighted those in red, as well as mid-frequency words, less commonly used words, highlighted in orange. Now, this is a little small font here. So I've copied it out into my Word document to make it easier for us to see. Here's the same text. Notice that words that are highlighted in red, there things like determinants, and susceptibility. Multi-syllabic words that are commonly used in the public health field, to represent things like determinants of health, things that cause health, or deficits in health as well as susceptibility, meaning risk or chance that something might happen, the potential for a negative event to happen. It's also highlighted words like objectives, which most people don't talk about objectives. They talk about what they want, they talk about what needs to happen. They don't talk about objectives. So changing those kinds of words, will help the text be easier for most people to understand. Let me give you another example. So this is a paragraph on survey data drawn from a PhD dissertation. Now, you would expect a PhD dissertation to be relatively difficult to read because it's using academic terminology, it's written for other academics. But we can highlight what we might want to change if we wanted to talk about the survey data and this research to a broader public audience by taking the text from this and putting it into the De-Jargonizer. So let me do that. Highlight this paragraph, and copy it. I'll go back up here and put it into the De-Jargonizer, and it start, and notice it's highlighted no red, but a lot of words that are orange, suggesting that they might be less common or more difficult for people to understand. Now, again I've gone back and copied that text already into my document here, so as you can see it. Notice the words that have been highlighted here. They're things like initiation, continuation, and termination of programs, prevalence estimates, incidence rates, as well as things like evaluating the effects of public health interventions. This is the terminology we often use when we talk about public health programs, or public health risks. But those terms most people don't necessarily understand. If you want to write this type of content for a broader audience, and make sure that people will understand it, you can't just substitute one word for another. You also have to change the structure of what you're writing so that each sentence will be written in plain language. Now, I've gone ahead and done that. So instead of talking about the rationale for initiation, and continuation, and terminations of programs, I tried to revise in using language that would be the way you might talk to a person on the street. So notice what I've done here, the first sentence is health professionals often use people's answers to survey questions to help them decide whether to start, continue, or stop programs that try to make people healthier. Notice, we don't have initiation, or termination, we have start and stop, words that everybody understands. Then later on, I say, health professionals also use the answers to these questions to figure out whether health programs are working. Notice, that's the idea of evaluation, but I don't use the word evaluation, I say, figure out whether something is working or not. That changing of the phrasing into plain language, means that people can get the idea without having to know the jargon. That's often what we need to do when we want to talk about health topics to a broader audience. So I wanted you to see this De-Jargonizer tool. There are other tools out there but I like this one, it is particularly useful, and I encourage you whenever you have text that you're trying to bring to a broad audience, to make sure to check the language that you're using and the words that they're using, to make sure that they aren't more difficult to understand than they need to be.
