Ok, your turn!  We want you to describe your research or job in something called an "elevator speech." Imagine this scenario: you run into a Big Shot investor, politician, or CEO in a elevator, and you want to tell them about why you are awesome and why they should keep talking with you about your research after they get off the elevator.  The elevator ride is quick, about 15 sec. And the Big Shot is familiar with your field but not an expert, so you can't use any jargon. But you think your research can be interesting to them and they'd be willing to sponsor you, if only you could get them interested in talking to you further.

So here's the challenge: make your elevator speech, and post it here. In particular, we want you to describe your research in 150 words or less, only using the "ten hundred" most common words. Use this text editor to make sure you are only using the ten hundred most common words (inspired by this xkcd comic).

We know that given 10 pages (or even 100), you could tell us everything there is to know about your research.  But you don't have that, you've got 150 words, and no jargon allowed. Now, go!

Why do we ask you to do this exercise? Although these are totally unrealistic constraints on any normal converstaion, this constraints force you to think outside the box. The word count forces you to really consider what is the core element needed to describe what you do. And the ten hundred word editor forces you to use words you wouldn't normally use to describe your research, breaking you out of your standard jargony description.

What is jargon?  That's hard to define, actually. Learning how to be an expert in a field often involves learning to speak the jargon of that field. Jargon provides an exact technical meaning, allowing experts to communicate about complex topics wihtout having to use tons and tons of descriptor words. Unfortunately, we all get so accostumed to talking about our work with jargon in our work environment that it takes a real, concerted effort to talk about our work without jargon.

We can put jargon into two categories. There's what we call "hard jargon," words that are clearly unitelligible to an outsider: e.g. "Quest Joint Airlock"- I have no idea what this is, unless I'm a NASA space station engineer. But more cryptically, there is "soft jargon," or words that are intelligible to outsiders, but have a specifical technical meaning in a field that is not known to outsiders: e.g. I know what a "module" is, but to a NASA engineers that means something very different than what I'm thinking about. Soft jargon is particularly elusive and difficult to remove. Also what qualifies as hard and soft jargon can differ depending on your audience. But in any case, a word that is in the list of the thousand most common used words in the English language is pretty much by definition not jargon to almost any audience, and that's why we added that constraint to this exercise.