Regina G. Barber is, by all official counts, a very smart cookie. One of the co-hosts of NPR’s science podcast Short Wave, Barber also holds a PhD in physics—and, in a past life, taught physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. She’s reported on dark matter, thick-billed parrots, and new species found in Peru; she’s covered black hole jets and NASA space missions. But one of Barber’s go-to journalistic tactics flies in the face of all that scholarly cachet. When she does interviews, she sometimes cuts people off to tell them: “That word you just used? I don’t know what that means.”
Barber is happy to disclose her knowledge gaps because it’s a surefire way to coax the scientists she’s speaking with to talk more plainly. Purging complex jargon from conversations is a crucial part of covering science: essential for ensuring that the writer—and by extension, the reader—grasps the topic at hand. Let too much jargon seep through, and the reporter risks not even understanding “what I’m actually writing about,” says Emily Anthes, a science reporter at The New York Times.
Although the theory of avoiding jargon is straightforward, the execution can be tricky at best. All the prep in the world—reading the scientific literature, crafting a perfect list of questions, finding a diverse selection of experts—can’t guarantee a conversation free of confusing terms and concepts. The challenges can be emotional and psychological, too: Extracting oneself from a maelstrom of jargon can require a writer to step outside their comfort zone and interrupt, which takes a certain kind of nerve and grit.
And for novice writers and veteran reporters alike, the desire to impress a prominent expert can send a discussion spiraling off into the incomprehensible. “Sometimes we let the interview get into the weeds because we are reluctant to admit that we’re not getting it,” says Anil Ananthaswamy, a freelance science journalist based in California who covers physics and machine learning. But, he says, “admitting that you’re not understanding something is completely okay”—and often necessary, to do the job of journalism well.
The ensuing seesaw of clarification can require a bit of time and effort, but it helps to keep in mind that reporters and the scientists they interview usually have a common goal: “to serve the public,” says Mekonnen Teshome, a freelance science journalist based in Ethiopia. Which makes acknowledging, and working through, the trickiest parts of interviews not a weakness, but a strength.
Prepping for a Storm
Every journalist, no matter their specialty, will at some point have to navigate a tough conversation with a source who speaks in terms that are difficult to understand. But that challenge can be especially common when interviewing scientists, who often aren’t trained to speak plainly about their work—and sometimes, are encouraged to do just the opposite, to communicate precisely and efficiently with others in their own field. For many researchers, speaking in jargon is “automatic,” Anthes says. As a journalist, “part of your job is just nudging them out of that habit.”
But that task can often be daunting, especially for reporters new to writing about science. Marina Koren, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers space, recalls feeling “a lot of pressure to look smart” while reporting one of her first science stories at The Atlantic in 2016. (Disclosure: I am a staff writer at The Atlantic but played no part in this article.) Koren, who got her start as a politics and breaking-news reporter, was covering research on the dwarf planet Ceres. But Koren was afraid to betray her lack of experience writing about space to her astronomer source by cutting in with additional questions. Only after the interview was over and Koren was trying to put together her draft, did she realize how lost she was. “I was like, ‘I don’t actually understand what they said to me, how am I supposed to write this story?’” she says. Koren reviewed her notes carefully, did some extra reading, and pulled together the piece. But “I do feel like I wrote an incomplete story,” she says.
Given the chance to do that story again, Koren says, she would have read up more on Ceres to better understand the stakes of the research she’d been covering. That sort of advance prep—scouring the scientific literature, skimming past coverage, Googling unfamiliar terms—can also make interviews feel less overwhelming, when technical terminology inevitably comes up. When tackling tricky topics, for instance, Meghie Rodrigues, a freelance science and climate journalist based in Brazil, will sometimes turn to artificial intelligence tools to clarify or explain obscure concepts while reading a paper. (The key, she adds, is remaining aware of the limits of AI, and making sure to double-check her understanding with an expert later on.)
Koren knew to rely on many of those strategies when she started covering climate change a few years later. But good interviewing also requires mustering courage: pushing past the nervousness, and not being afraid to interrupt a source each time you stop following their answer.
Scientists do place immense value on technical knowledge. So, it’s easy to “get self-conscious, and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to seem stupid,’” Barber says. But journalists shouldn’t assume that the scientists they speak to will think that—in the same way that they, ideally, aren’t adopting that mindset about the students in their lecture halls or laboratories. Plus, Barber points out, the goal isn’t really to get an expert source to speak to you like a colleague. Barber can recall instances in which she would tell physicist sources that she, too, was a scientist—and it would “give them permission to stay in the jargon world,” she says.
Avoiding the Flood
No matter the story, if science is involved, at least a little bit of jargon is bound to come up. How journalists approach their interviews, though, can dictate just how much technical terminology they have to wade through as a conversation progresses.
The very start of an interview is a key place to set the stage. It helps, for example, to clue your sources in to the type of audience you’re writing for—usually, not an exclusively academic one. Saying something like “I’m going to ask you some basic questions here,” Anthes says, can also be useful.
Koren also recommends disclosing from the outset if you’re new to a subject, or feeling particularly shaky on some core concepts. In the same way that journalists expect their sources to be open with them, it’s important to be transparent with them about where you, as the reporter, are coming from. Try framing that disclaimer as an invitation to speak casually—offering permission in a friendly way, rather than anything that might come off as scolding, or a request for the researcher to work harder.
Journalists can also leverage the informal warmup at top of an interview—the dreaded small talk—for their benefit. Barber recommends starting off by just chatting with sources. These openers can still be about their science: Why they’re passionate about the topic at hand; a fun story about how their research began. Once people relax, jargon tends to ebb. But that initial back-and-forth can truly be about anything as long as it’s relatable. Getting a source, especially a nervous one, to speak comfortably about a subject that excites them—a TV show, a hobby—might remind them that they’re just talking to another person who’s interested in what they have to say, Barber says.
Pay attention to what’s happening in the background of a video call, too, Anthes says. The flick of a cat tail on the screen can prompt a question about a beloved pet; a yell from a toddler might cue an aside about the challenges of balancing a career with parenting. If needed, these approaches can even be compatible with the tight timelines of breaking news: No matter my deadline, I always start my conversations with sources by asking how they’re feeling about the events we’re talking about. Anthes also often asks the interviewee, “Do you have any questions for me before we start?” That simple, considerate question can put sources at ease, and remove any potential feelings that they’re entering a one-sided interrogation.
Warmups can also be a good place for a journalist to gauge what the rest of the interview might look like. The first few minutes of any conversation offer an opportunity to assess early on whether a source is, say, inclined to speaking formally, not terribly media-savvy, or totally unwilling to be interrupted, Ananthaswamy says. All of those patterns can be a preview into how much jargon you might have to deal with—and for journalists who feel comfortable interrupting, they can foreshadow how often you’ll have to cut in with questions along the way.
People who lean heavily on jargon are usually “in that mode from the beginning,” Anthes says. There’s no perfect way to tell which scientists might be more prone to jargon, but a good litmus test can involve simply asking the source to tell you about their work and what motivates them—essentially, a subtle way to see if they can be coaxed into telling a good story. “Do they immediately assume expert knowledge?” Anthes says.
Navigating Choppy Waters
Sometimes, though, once a researcher gets going about their own work, the jargon can still start trickling in. While it might be tempting to just let a source monologue for a bit, it’s generally best for everyone in the conversation to stay on the same page in real time to avoid a question pile-up, or worse, getting so lost that the entire discussion gets derailed. A rule of thumb that I’ve loosely followed in the past is to not let a source talk for more than three or four minutes uninterrupted, unless they’re telling a personal or sensitive story—and maybe even less time, if they’re explaining an unfamiliar concept. Even reporters who are pretty sure they’re understanding their source can benefit from cutting in briefly to gut check their own understanding.
Those check-ins can require a reporter to summon some grit and interrupt their source. This isn’t always easy—but Rodrigues stresses that clarity, in this case, trumps etiquette.
And there are still plenty of ways to be gracious: Excuse me. One second. So sorry to cut in. For video interviews, Rodrigues will also wait for her source to take a breath and then interject, or occasionally try waving her hand. Then, she tells the source what she’s after: “Let’s see if we are on the same page,” she says before checking her understanding. She also often tries paraphrasing her source’s own words back to them in simpler terms. If it’s correct, great—and if not, the researcher will take that as a clear cue to try again.
If a source is struggling to answer a question in an accessible way, try asking the same question again in a slightly different way—maybe by including more specificity, or some concrete terms. In my own reporting, for instance, I’ve tried something like this: Instead of Can you explain concept X?, asking Was the way you figured out concept X through experiment Y? It may take a few rephrasing attempts before you land on a version that guides your source to answer at the right level, but the persistence usually pays off: Usually, a few gentle nudges or follow-up questions are enough to get a conversation onto the right track.
When a topic is especially tricky, and Anthes wants an extra check, she’ll also sometimes confirm with a researcher over email that her paraphrases of their conversation are correct. (As long as the situation doesn’t progress to showing a source the actual text of the article—per many outlets’ editorial guidelines— these sorts of exchanges are fine.) If there’s time for a follow-up call, that might help cut through the density, too. When making requests for those follow-ups, it’s a good idea to be clear about the reason: I wanted to ask a few follow-up questions so I can better understand A, B, and C.
It’s rare, but there may come a point when all of these strategies fail, and it can be useful to have a threshold for when to call it quits. If Koren has asked essentially the same question two or three times, or it’s been 40 minutes, and the concepts are as unclear as ever, it’s probably time to move on and end the interview.
Sometimes, that might mean that a source doesn’t make it into a story. But there’s no point into trying to force a dense or opaque quote into otherwise clear copy. Plus, there’s almost always an alternative source (be it a graduate student in the same research group, or another expert in the field) who might help crystallize a concept—for you and your readers.
Some journalists might worry that they’ll meet resistance when they ask a source to discard jargon from their answers. But in most cases, Teshome says, scientists are happy to try to speak more plainly. Some researchers may even be grateful for being told they’re not being clear enough. Asking follow-up questions also creates common ground: No reporter would be seeking clarification about a subject that they didn’t care about, too. And don’t give into any feelings of self-consciousness. Academics of course value knowledge—but they also usually prize the opportunity to teach.
The process might feel laborious sometimes, but “I don’t ever feel that it’s not worth it,” Ananthaswamy says. A few years ago, he reported a story for Quanta, describing a new way that artificial intelligence could generate images. The article required him to understand non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and “honestly, the first pass of those interviews, I really struggled to understand what was going on,” he says, and had to read more on his own before he even did his follow-ups with sources. In the end, though, the concepts clicked—and the effort all paid off. That’s part of what drew him to the job of science journalism, he says: The joy of at first not comprehending, then finally feeling all the pieces fall into place.
Katherine J. Wu is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Before that, she was a science reporter for The New York Times, an early-career fellow at The Open Notebook, and a AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Smithsonian in 2018. She holds a PhD in microbiology and immunobiology from Harvard University. She won a 2022 Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication, a 2021 Science in Society Award, and the 2020 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. Follow her on Bluesky @Katherine J. Wu.