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.

I’ve often heard of praise for teachers who work tirelessly to help that one student who is having trouble. The teacher puts in the hard work over a long stretch of time, and eventually reaps the rewards when the student finally catches on to the content being taught in class. This teacher is then lauded as a great person for investing all that time into a student who needed help.

I once had a mathematics teacher who would say something that bugged me: what we’re doing is easy. I am barely being hyperbolic when I say that this teacher would say this for every single concept we learned. Therefore, I couldn’t help but think that surely not everything could be this easy.