Can you explain your research using only the thousand most common words in the English language? This challenge has been going around since Randall Munroe (famous for the xkcd comics) published a comic in which he explains how the Saturn V space shuttle works using only sketches and the thousand most common words. Hence the name up-goer five, as both the words shuttle and rocket are not in that list. The fun thing about this challenge is that it makes you think about what your research is really about, and formulate this using normal, everyday language.
As dissemination manager of CoCA (i.e. the person who tells other people what we find in our studies), I took it upon me to describe the CoCA project using only these thousand most common words. Luckily, someone was kind enough to create an online tool that tells you when you’re using a word that’s not in the list (so now I know that project and research are not allowed, but studies is. Yay!).
Now before I show to you the result of my effort, let me first write a disclaimer. One of the nice things about the richness of language is that you can use it for nuances. And nuance is something that scientists love. By specifically choosing your words, you can make clear what you mean exactly. Jargon helps us even more in this, because everyone else who knows this jargon knows exactly what you mean. Anyway, the disclaimer here is that if you use only the most common thousand words, you lose nuance. So I know that ‘a person who cannot sit still and pay attention’ is a very poor description of a person with ADHD. But I challenge you to do better!
So here it goes, the CoCA project described in common English:
We study why people who can’t sit still and pay attention also often feel sad, or eat too much, or use too much of things that are not good for them and can’t stop with it. They have these problems more often than people who are better at sitting still and paying attention, and the problems get worse when they become older. We think that this is because their brain works a bit different. We try to help them by making them jump and run every day, and by giving them more light. And we give them a phone to show them what they should do, and how good they are doing each day. The jumping and running and more light each day should make them more happy. We also look in their brains for things that cause both not sitting still and eating too much, or not paying attention and feeling sad. When we understand better how these things in our brains can cause these problems, we can help the people who have these problems to get better.
What do you think? Does this help you to understand what the project is about? Or does it remain very vague (what problems? Which things in brains?).
I’m very curious to see if other CoCA researchers can do a better job at this. Or maybe they can describe their parts in the project using this online tool. And researchers from the other projects, Aggressotype, MiND, can use the tool to describe their projects. Challenge accepted?
Try it out yourself: http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ (or use the Norwegian or Spanish version!)
And in case you are now very curious about what the CoCA project is really about, you can read more about it here.
This post was written by Jeanette Mostert. Jeanette is dissemination manager of the CoCA project.
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