Abstract
The treatment of technical vocabulary largely deter-mines its effectiveness as a medium of communication. The present paper describes how six O-level1 Biology texts were analysed, to discover how they dealt with terminology. Two categories of vocabulary were recognised: the terms peculiar to individual books and those common to all books. Individual vocabu-laries were of different sizes because of divergences in style and the use of various synonyms to express the same idea. (Synonyms also increase vocabulary burden and make it more difficult for a pupil to pass from one book to another.) The common vocabulary was thought to contain the most important terms, and the authors' treatment of them seemed to bear this out: a large majority were both explained and emphasised. Technical vocabulary would be used even more effectively if synonyms were eliminated and all the remaining terms were explained and emphasised at their first appearance.
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