On the first day of cell physiology class, my professor stood at the front of the room and said, “I’ve been working with these concepts and researching this material for over 40 years. Sometimes, I will use words that you don’t understand. I don’t use those words to try to intimidate you, I use them because I’ve been saying these words for so long that I’ve forgotten that, to most people, they are jargon. Please ask me what a word means if you don’t understand it.”

We have all been my cell physiology professor. Maybe you can rattle off 50 different dog breeds, or maybe you know the precise difference between a frying pan and a sauté pan. We all have some topic in which our deep knowledge feels so natural that we don’t even realize we’re using jargon. In everyday life, this might just result in the occasional confused look from a friend, but when writing museum labels it can become a real problem. Jargon-filled museum exhibits are inaccessible. At best, they ensure that visitors move quickly through your exhibit, barely glancing at the titles on the labels. At worst, they may lead people to decide that “(fill in the blank topic) is too complicated for me to understand.”

My cell physiology professor took a great first step: he recognized that he had lost the ability to recognize jargon in his field. However, he waited on feedback from his students to rephrase his lecture into something everyone could understand. If only he could have altered his language ahead of time.

Luckily, there are methods of eliminating jargon other than gathering together a roomful of perplexed undergraduates. Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD comics and former NASA engineer, makes a living out of explaining complicated concepts in simple, and even humorous, ways. In 2015, he devised a web-based text editor called Simple Writer that can help anyone strip out their jargon. All you have to do is type into a box. Words that are not in the top 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language turn red.

For example. . .

Here is an explanation of a scientific phenomenon that I wrote using Simple Writer. See if you can guess what it’s about.

Dead Animals Can Turn into Rocks

Sometimes, when animals die, they become a special kind of rock. This takes a very long time. It often happens when the dead animal gets covered by wet dirt right away, because then it doesn’t get eaten by other animals.

Over time, ground water that has little bits of rock in it moves through the dead animal until some of its body parts are made up of rock instead of animal. Usually, only the bones or other hard parts become rock, but sometimes soft parts can turn into rock too.

You can find these rocks outside, but it is easier to find them in some places than in others. These rocks are important because they teach us about what kinds of animals lived in the past and what the animals that don’t live anymore were like.

If you guessed “fossils,” you were right!

This explanation of fossils illustrates two key points about Simple Writer. First, even if your vocabulary is severely limited, it is still possible to describe a complex topic in pretty specific detail. Second, you would never want to write museum copy using only the words available to you in Simple Writer! Besides the issue that the word “fossil” itself isn’t allowed, you may have noticed that my explanation only mentioned animals. That is because the word “plant” is not common enough for Simple Writer. I don’t think most museums worry about alienating people with the word “plant.”

So, Simple Writer is not a one-stop shop for writing perfectly-worded museum copy. But, if you’re ever wondering how to check your jargon at the door, it’s a great place to start.