Yesterday was the Annual Student Conference at The Institute of Cancer Research, London. As part of the ICR's Communications team, we helped run a session about the myriad ways that science can (and should) be communicated more effectively.

During this session my colleague Rob Dawson (@BioSciFan on Twitter) introduced a fun tool called the The Up-Goer Five Text Editor. This tool lets you edit text…but only by using the 1,000 most common words in the English language.

It was inspired by an XKCD comic which used the same approach to try to explain how an Apollo moon rocket works. Using this tool really makes you appreciate that just about every scientific word you might use is not on the list. So it is a good way of making you think about how to communicate science to a lay audience, completely free of jargon.

I thought I would have a go at explaining genomics. I couldn't even use the words 'science', 'machine', or 'blueprint' (let alone 'gene', 'DNA', or 'molecule'). Here is my attempt:

In every cell of our bodies, there is a written plan that explains how that cell should make all of the things that it needs to make. A cell that grows hair is very different to a cell that is in your heart or brain. However, all cells still have the same plan but different parts of the plan are turned on in different cells.

We first understood what the full plan looks like for humans in 2003. We can use computers to make sense of the plan and to learn more about how many parts are needed to make a human (about 20,000). The better we understand the plan, the more we might be able to make human lives better.

You can edit my version online but I encourage people to try explaining your own field of work using this tool.