Jargon makes you look less intelligent (and six other reasons why you should use less jargon)

“But if I make things too clear, people won’t take me seriously.”

We hear this all the time in our workshops. People give it as a reason to keep writing dense, jargon-filled texts, and not only in papers. It shows up in posters, reports, graphical abstracts, infographics, video scripts and social media posts. And we understand the hesitation: many of us in academia were (subconsciously) trained to believe that jargon proves we are smart. Write simply, the fear goes, and people will think you have dumbed it down because you do not trust your audience to handle the real thing.

These concerns are real. Nobody wants to be seen as less intelligent. But a growing pile of peer-reviewed research shows that jargon does not help you at all, it has no upside. It makes you look bad, it makes your reader feel stupid, and it silently damages the things scientists care about most: credibility, citations and collaboration. And really, the whole point of communicating is to have people understand you, so why put that at risk by making your message harder than it needs to be?

On top of that, nobody asked for your paper, your report or your poster. If you want policymakers, clinicians, journalists or researchers in the next field over to act on your work, the burden of being understood is on you. If they don’t, you haven’t communicated.

If your audience doesn’t understand you, you haven’t communicated properly.

When we ask researchers why they resist writing so that everyone can follow, we hear the same five justifications.

• “My audience is smart enough to handle dense text, and simple language is insulting to their intelligence.”
• “If it reads easily, it will seem less rigorous.”
• “My research is too complex to simplify without losing accuracy. I need to be complete at all times.”
• “This is how everyone in my field writes, we’ve done it for decades, and my supervisor will never sign off on anything else.”
• And the classic: “It is the reader’s job to keep up, not mine.”

Each of these justifications probably sounds familiar, and you may even have said them yourself. But none of them survive the evidence, so let’s go through what you’re actually doing or signalling when you write this way.

1. Insecure researchers use the most jargon

Let’s start with an uncomfortable finding. Researchers who feel their status is under threat use the most jargon.

Brown, Anicich and Galinsky (2020) analysed the titles of 64,956 dissertations and master’s theses. Authors from lower-ranked universities used more complex language and more acronyms in their titles than authors from higher-ranked ones, even after accounting for topic, degree type, length and year.

Their experiments showed the effect is causal. When people were made to feel low status before a pitch competition, they were more likely to pick the jargon-heavy version of their pitch. The same thing happened in live conversations. Feeling low status pulled their attention away from being understood and towards worrying about how the audience perceived them.

High-status people focus on being understood. Low-status people focus on how they are perceived, and reach for jargon to compensate.

So if you catch yourself adding technical terms to sound smart, pause. We all share the sense that someone who truly understands a topic can explain it simply, so readers run that backwards: when writing feels needlessly complex, they start to suspect you’re hiding behind the words. The jargon you reached for to look like an expert can signal the opposite.

2. Jargon makes you look less intelligent

Maybe insecure people use jargon, but does it at least work? No. Oppenheimer (2006) tested exactly this, in a paper with the wonderfully ironic title “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity.”

He took graduate admission essays and made them more complex by swapping words for their longest thesaurus entries, keeping the meaning identical. Readers perceived the authors of the complex versions as less intelligent, and were less likely to admit them in a mock review. This held no matter how good the original essay was. In another experiment the team did the reverse: they simplified a real sociology abstract, and ratings of the author’s intelligence went up.

The effect even survived a famous name. When readers were told a complex passage was written by Descartes, they still rated the author as less intelligent than readers who got the clear version.

Why does this happen? The easier a text is to read, the more we warm to the person who wrote it, and the smarter we assume they are. When words flow, that good feeling rubs off on the author. Oppenheimer showed the same thing from another angle. He printed the same essay in a hard-to-read font, and readers rated the author as less intelligent. Nothing about the words changed, but just being harder to read was enough to lower their opinion of the writer.

If you want to be seen as more intelligent, write clearly and simply.

Another worry is that plain language makes you less credible. That’s also not the case. Kerwer and colleagues (2021) had laypeople read psychology findings either as a standard scientific abstract or as a plain language summary. The plain versions were understood better and rated as more credible, and readers felt more confident making decisions based on them.

3. Jargon tells your reader: this is not for you

The damage goes beyond how people judge you. Jargon also does something to your audience, as Shulman and colleagues (2020) showed.

They gave 650 people short texts about topics such as self-driving cars and surgical robots, in a high-jargon or low-jargon version of the same content. The jargon-heavy versions felt harder to read, and that set off a chain reaction. Readers who struggled with the text identified less as “the kind of person who is into science.” They said they were less interested in the topic, felt less able to understand it, and were less likely to look for more information.

Notice what is going on. Readers don’t think “this text is badly written.” They think “I’m not smart enough for this” or “this isn’t for me,” and then they leave. The authors call jargon exclusionary language, because it signals membership of an expert club and shuts out everyone else.

Readers don’t decide your writing is bad. They decide they’re not clever enough for it, and then they leave.

Just think of all the unintended consequences this has! Someone skips your poster after a glance at the complex title, pulls out their phone during your overly complicated talk, or drops your paper the moment the abstract gets heavy.

Here’s the surprising part: adding definitions did not help. Shulman’s team gave some readers a pop-up definition for every jargon term, but it made no difference to how hard the text felt. The readers who actually used the definitions had an even harder time, because stopping to look things up broke their reading flow. So you can’t patch a jargon-filled text with a glossary.

There’s one idea sitting underneath all of this: mental bandwidth. Every reader has a limited capacity to take in, process and hold information, whoever they are. Psychologists call it Cognitive Load Theory. We think of it like an internet connection, fine for everyday browsing, but quick to stall the moment you load too much at once. Jargon loads too much at once. Every unfamiliar term is a small download your reader has to run before they can carry on, and if it stalls often enough, they close the tab. It’s a big enough idea that we gave it its own blog, Why you should make science communication easy to understand.

4. Jargon makes people resist your message

It gets worse. In a related study, Bullock and colleagues (2019) found that readers of jargon-heavy texts did more than switch off. They pushed back. Jargon made people argue against the science, rate technology as riskier, and support it less.

Think about what that means for your work. The moment your text feels difficult, readers don’t just stop taking in your findings. They even start to distrust them. If you communicate about vaccines, climate or new technology, jargon doesn’t just make you sound authoritative. You may have just handed your audience a reason to resist its message.

The moment your writing feels hard, people start to distrust what it says.

5. Jargon costs you citations

At this point in the workshop someone will raise a hand and argue that their colleagues can handle dense text. That’s actually true, but they just cite it less.

Martínez and Mammola (2021) analysed 21,486 papers in cave science, a field where researchers from many disciplines have to read each other’s work. The more jargon in the title and abstract, the fewer citations a paper picked up. Your title and abstract are the only parts most people will ever see, so if you fill them with jargon, colleagues from nearby fields never reach your findings.

Yes, your colleagues can handle dense text, but they will cite it less.

The reverse holds too. Freeling, Doubleday and Connell (2019) scored ecology abstracts on features such as signposting and avoiding stacked nouns, and found that better-written abstracts attracted more citations. And when Ryba and colleagues (2021) rewrote real abstracts at four levels of accessibility and tested them on 170 readers, the accessible versions were understood better and left readers more confident. Same science + better writing = better outcomes.

6. Jargon keeps your work hidden from the people who need to see it

Fewer citations is a cost mostly felt inside academia. The bigger cost is in the “real world”. Your research only has an impact when someone acts on it: a clinician choosing a treatment, a patient weighing their options, a colleague trying a new method, a policymaker arguing for new legislation, a journalist writing about it for the public. If they can’t understand your work, your work stops at the journal.

And the stakes are real. When researchers asked 215 adults what common medical phrases meant, more people thought “an occult infection” had something to do with a curse than knew it means a hidden infection (Gotlieb et al., 2022). That is not a harmless mix-up. A patient who misreads “occult infection,” a “negative result” or “positive margins” makes worse decisions about their own body.

The big publishers have noticed. A correspondence in the Lancet argued in 2024 that medical articles should include a plain language summary, because patients are now expected to help decide about their own care, and they can’t do that if the evidence is written in language only specialists read.

Taylor & Francis says a plain language summary lets your research “be read and understood by multiple individuals inside and outside your discipline” and help you “influence policy makers, professionals, the public and researchers from other disciplines.” We fully agree.

Sage puts it plainly: technical language and jargon “can act as a barrier to further understanding.” So don’t just take it from us. The European Union’s Clinical Trial Regulation now requires a plain language summary of trial results for the public, and many funders ask for the same. When the biggest publishers and regulators build whole systems to undo jargon after the fact, that tells you how much damage it does in the first place.

You might worry there’s no floor here, and that you should keep simplifying until nothing is left. But plain doesn’t mean as simple as possible, it means that it should fit your specific audience. Your abstract is for specialists and your plain language summary is for a wider audience, so they stay two texts at two levels. Once your writing fits the reader in front of you, you can stop simplifying. In one study, patients and caregivers (over half of them with a university degree) were shown summaries of a piece of research at different levels (Martínez Silvagnoli et al., 2022). They preferred the version written for a reading age of 14 to 17, well below university level, but a bit more complex than the simplest version, because the simplest one had dropped the detail they actually wanted to know about. Even highly educated readers didn’t want to read more difficult text.

There’s a fairness problem too

Most people in academia don’t have English as a first language, yet most science is published in English. Pile jargon on top of a second language and you shut out the very people your work is often meant to serve: patients, practitioners and researchers in other countries, and anyone outside your narrow circle. Jargon builds a wall around academia and hands the key only to people who already have one. That’s the opposite of what public research is for.

If the public paid for your research, the public should be able to understand it.

7. Jargon closes the door to collaboration

This finding is new, and we think it matters most of all. Bullock and Bisbey (2025) ran an experiment with 1,826 people who imagined starting a new job and got a welcome email, with or without jargon. The jargon-heavy version lowered readers’ confidence that they could do their tasks. And it changed how they behaved: readers of the jargon email were less willing to ask questions and less willing to share information afterwards.

Read that again. Jargon quietly trains people to stop talking to you. They ask fewer questions, share less, and keep their distance rather than risk looking ignorant.

Jargon doesn’t just cost you readers. It stops people asking you questions and sharing what they know.

That’s the opposite of what science needs. Collaboration runs on people feeling safe enough to say “I don’t follow, can you explain?” Every jargon-filled email, presentation or project report makes that question a little more expensive. If you want an inclusive research group, an interdisciplinary project that actually works, or a policymaker who calls you back, clear language is essential. This advice goes beyond just science communication, but is also useful when sending emails to colleagues and job interviews. Making sure people understand your work is essential everywhere!

Here’s what that looks like in a job application, where we usually write with jargon because we think it sounds impressive:

Too jargony: “My doctoral research leveraged a multi-omics framework to interrogate host-pathogen interactomes.”

Clearer: “In my PhD I combined several kinds of biological data to work out how bacteria and the body affect each other during infection.”

If the panel can’t follow what you did, they can’t be impressed by it. The plain version shows you know exactly what you worked on.

Liesbeth: “Walter Willett was head of the nutrition department at Harvard School of Public Health where I worked. In every presentation he would talk in a way that let everyone understand even complex topics. It made him well-liked, and it made you feel good about yourself, because thanks to him you could follow all of it. He always used to say that doing science communication in a women’s magazine was just as important as publishing papers.”

Clear writing is essential to good science communication

Clarity is not a favour you do a lazy audience. It shapes how people judge your intelligence, whether they trust your findings, whether your peers cite you, whether professionals, patients or policymakers can act on your work, and whether your colleagues and students feel safe enough to ask you a question. That’s almost everything you care about as a scientist.

So we’ll be blunt. Next time you reach for a longer word to sound serious, lean on a vague phrase, or defend a dense paragraph because “that’s how it’s done,” stop. Not one of these excuses survives the evidence, and every one of them costs you readers, citations, trust and collaborators. We’d be glad never to hear them in a workshop again.

Try this today: take the last thing you made for an audience outside your niche, whether it’s a paper, a poster or a blog. Rewrite the title so it delivers your conclusion, and replace three terms an outsider would trip over. You will sound so much smarter!