Elucidate is unnecessary but not terrible - at least it's used in everyday writing. If I had my druthers, I would ask for a less cumbersome word to be used. Still, I think most reasonably educated people would know what it means without missing a beat.
Words like ameliorate are just wrong. Just absolutely wrong.
I guess I'm having a hard time understanding the distinction you're working to draw between the three words. All three mean something, and could be argued to have value because of their pithiness [0]. If you're inclined, I'd be interested in a bit more of you're framing. Especially in terms of bio-medical texts, I'm a bit confused which characteristics make 'ameliorate' worse than 'in situ'.
[0] Like this word. I could have said "Because of their precise meaning", but I picked a word that encapsulates that directly.
As someone who recently used `ameliorate` in an abstract(!), let me make the case for it.
`Target` sounds active and vigorous, but it is quite vague in that context. You can target a diseased brain region (for stimulation, surgical removal, etc) or a mutated gene for deletion, but it's not clear to me what "targeting" something abstract like a disease would mean.
`Ameliorate` means "to make something better". It has the added implication that the situation is quite bad, but the intervention won't totally restore things to normality. This is exactly what I meant: we don't think this intervention is a silver bullet that will reverse the disease, but it seems like it should help--and our proposal is cheap and easy, so...consider it.
This also keeps Reviewer #2 from busting your chops over how effective the proposed strategies might be, which you'd be inviting with a stronger word like "cure."
Here, you could also use `treat`, which feels like an intermediate-strength claim. "Manage" might work too though that comes with implications of its own too: to me, managing a disease suggests that it is temporarily being held at bay, or the negative consequences are averted without fixing the underlying problem.
I learned `ameliorate` in junior high--and was writing for people with PhDs--so I went for it.
The target audience for most academic papers is not the general public and these words or phrases are known to the target audience. If the idea is that academic papers should have a more general audience, then I feel that’s a different statement, because I agree that academic papers are often less accessible to non-target audience members due to word choice.
In the case you mentioned there is a bit of redundancy which makes the word “ameliorate” easy to substitute. Terms like “therapeutic” and “misfolding” make it easy to derive that we’re going from a bad to good state.
“Activated protein X ameliorates biofilm formation” has more content than if we swapped to “target” in this case, because it has the added effect of indicating that the interaction was “good”.
As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.
> As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.
Elucidate is unnecessary but not terrible - at least it's used in everyday writing. If I had my druthers, I would ask for a less cumbersome word to be used. Still, I think most reasonably educated people would know what it means without missing a beat.
Words like ameliorate are just wrong. Just absolutely wrong.