Writing Blog Number 2

20250514 Technical Terms

Technical Terms

This came up on Discord recently – when do we use technical terms in writing fiction?

First, a definition – a technical term is a word or phrase that is specific to an occupation or qualification, or which has a different meaning when used by an occupation. So, an example would be “pedagogy” which is a term used in education circles and very few other places; another word would be “indulgence” which has a meaning most people know, but has a very different meaning in Catholic ecclesiastical terminology.
         If we know about a subject, we are going to want to use technical terms in our writing. But is that entirely appropriate when dealing with an audience that will probably not have the same knowledge base as the author.

We could go the Michael Crichton route, where technical terms are explained in-text, though this does tend to slow the pace to quite a ridiculous degree. In Jurassic Park, he changed it up by having a film made for the uneducated give the technical terms and their meanings. But, still, it was essentially an info dump.
         Or we could go the Arthur C. Clarke route and just dump a heap of technical terms into the narrative and assume your reader is intelligent enough to understand what they mean by context or prior knowledge. Personally, this is the way I would prefer to do things, but editors are as unadept at the subjects I know about as the general populace, and so this has caused issues for my publication chances.

So… what?

Here is what was recommended to me by the editor of a magazine in the US back in the early 2000s. When people talk, they will use technical terms, acronyms and abbreviations because they know what they mean. They never explain them. In general, it is said that the first time you use an acronym or abbreviation in a story, you explain what it means, but people are not going to say, “Give me twenty cc’s of ibuprofen, stat! Which, of course, you know means give me a syringe with twenty cubic centimetres of the drug ibuprofen, a non-steroidal pain reliever, stat, and by that, I mean right away.” The editor said to try and get the more technical terms into the narrative and then explain them with a clause of no more than half a dozen words.
         So, “Give me twenty cc’s of ibuprofen, stat!” // Bob nodded and drew twenty cubic centimetres of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug into the syringe before handing it to Bill, going as fast as he possibly could.
         That is as clunky as all out, but everything is explained without info-dumping; it is a part of the ongoing action.
         Another way is having a newbie character – see the first Hellboy movie for an example – who knows nothing and so everything needs to be explained to them. They can ask questions, acting as an audience surrogate. I personally find this cheap and a little lazy, but it does make sense, and works well for most audiences.

That’s all well and good when it comes to dialogue, but what about in narrative? If I said, “Bill grabbed Bob around the waist and suplexed him hard onto the edge of the ladder,” in a fight scene, the word “suplex” would make most people go, “Huh?” But if I said, “Bill grabbed Bob around the waist and lifted him off the ground, above his shoulders and then down hard, Bob’s back slamming onto the edge of the ladder, a picture-perfect suplex,” I have explained it first and then given the technical term without detracting from the narrative flow, and yet explaining a word I can then use without explanation later on.

So, that was the advice given by a few editors I have worked with – use the description first, and then add the technical term afterwards. Don’t do it too often, and too close to another time you do it, or else it reads rather boring, but that is the way it was recommended to me.

Let’s go back to that opening question: when do we use technical terms in writing fiction?
         Whenever they would be used in real life, but explain them carefully, without giving an essay, and make the explanations part of the flow of the action, not be a simple info-dump.