REAL LIFE NEWS: VERBOSE VOCABULARY DOES NOT MAKE YOU LOOK CLEVER
by Hazed
Terrible news for those who, like me, prefer to use long words: it doesn’t make you look smarter. On the contrary, it actually makes you seem to be less capable than people who use short words.
This comes from Daniel M Oppenheimer, who is professor of psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He ran a series of studies about the use of language, and how it can make you appear more or less intelligent.
In one study, the team of researchers took college admission essays that had been posted online, and used an algorithm to replace short words with longer words. Then they asked participants to evaluate the quality of the author. The surprising result was that participants rated the authors as less capable and less confident.
To make sure the algorithm hadn’t simply made the essays worse, they then did the reverse. They took the abstracts from sociology dissertations, which typically are full of long words, and replaced the long words with shorter one. Once again, the writing containing shorter words was deemed to be written by more capable and intelligent authors.
The reason, Oppenheimer explains, is that pieces with short words are easier to process, and that’s strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence and capability. In other words, if people find it hard to understand what you are saying they will judge you unfavourably.
I guess it’s all about clarity. Use long words where they have the right nuances to explain exactly what you mean, but don’t use long words just for the sake of it. As Oppenheimer says, “You should use use instead of utilizing utilize.”
Still, this isn’t going to stop me glorying in the mellifluousness of the English language in all its long-winded glory!
