Can authority be sustained while balancing accessibility and formality?

Abstract

Economics has developed into a quantitative discipline that makes extensive use of mathematical and statistical concepts. When writing a dictionary for economics undergraduates it has to be recognised that many users will not have suffi cient training in mathematics to benefi t from formal defi nitions of mathematical and statistical concepts. In fact, it is more than likely that the user will want the dictionary to provide an accessible version of a defi nition that avoids mathematical notation. Providing a verbal description of a mathematical concept has the risk that the outcome is both verbose (compared to a defi nition using appropriate mathematical symbols) and imprecise. For the author of a dictionary this raises the question of how to resolve this confl ict between accessibility and formal correctness. We use a range of examples from the Oxford Dictionary of Economics to illustrate this confl ict and to assess the extent to which a non-formal defi nition can be viewed as authoritative.