Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years.

People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

The increasing technicality of the terminology employed is also a serious difficulty. It has become necessary to learn an extensive vocabulary before a book in even a limited department of science can be consulted with much profit. This change, of course, has its advantages for the initiated, in securing precision and concisement of statement; but it tends to narrow the field in which an investigator can labor, and it cannot fail to become, in the future, a serious impediment …

I was not especially a writer back in college.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'

Sometimes when you're listening to a neuroscientist, they have a tendency to use a particular type of jargon that works in their world perfectly but that would lose the average layman.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.

The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work.