The term jargon applies to words that are potentially confusing or impenetrable to most readers either because they are very specific to a certain field or because they have different uses or meanings in different fields.
Jargon is necessary in some genres in order to make the scenes, conversations, procedures etc. realistic and authentic. For example, in crime fiction, the use of jargon may be necessary to bring realism to your work – when police, forensics, medical examiners are talking for example. It is also useful to add authenticity and authority to characters and to give readers a feel for their personalities – a snobby university professor, for example, who wants to impress his colleagues, might drop a few literary terms into his conversations. If this is only a veil of pretention, and they don’t actually have the knowledge to back up how they want to be perceived, they may…
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Kim's Musings 