My primary supervisor once introduced me to a colleague with the words “Cath has the ability to translate Science into English”.
\nThat’s actually not a bad description of parts of my job, which includes writing lay summaries of research projects for grant submissions and websites. This is actually one of my favourite duties, to the surprise of many of my colleagues.
\nWord must be spreading, because I’m getting more and more requests to provide lay summaries for various purposes. What bothers me though is the language used in these requests. There is a definite trend towards making nouns and adjectives into verbs.
\nI’ve had:
\n“please can you lay this language for me”
\nand
\n“if you could just laymanise this technical abstract”.
\nPlease, people. It’s painful. Can anyone on Nature Network suggest a better term? I suppose I’ll let you verb a noun if it sounds better than the alternatives above…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My primary supervisor once introduced me to a colleague with the words “Cath has the ability to translate Science into English”. That’s actually not a bad description of parts of my job, which includes writing lay summaries of research projects … Continue reading