Interesting Story...

Big Words Make You Look Dumb?
from the Consequences-of-Erudite-Vernacular-Utilized-Irrespective-of-Necessity dept
When I was in junior high school, I had a teacher who tried to encourage students to expand their vocabulary. What she did was encourage students to try out "new words" in any papers they wrote for the class. However, because students aren't always comfortable with those words, we were told to write (new word) after the new word -- parenthetically pointing out that we knew that word might be awkward or flat out wrong. Ever since then, however, I tend to notice when writers use a "big" word where a small one would do and mentally add the (new word) marking to it. According to a new study, I may not be the only one. People notice when writers use large words where small ones will do -- and it doesn't make them think very highly of the writer. In fact, all those attempts to look smart tend to backfire and make people think you're even dumber. It's probably a case where the general awkwardness of the larger words make people feel that the writer is trying too hard. Of course, Clive Thompson (who we link to for this story) has another explanation. He feels that the test, which was done by simply swapping out actual simple words with thesaurus-picked complex ones, modified the original meaning just enough that it didn't feel right -- making people think the writer was less intelligent when, perhaps, a natural writer could use larger words effectively in writing the entire sentence. Perhaps it really depends on the context. In certain types of writing, short words just make more sense than others.

I can attest to this as well. There's a blog that I occasionally glance at and when I'm reading it I get a sense that he tried too hard. Anyway, I'm left in the dust not really understanding his point, because of the big words and funky sentence structure. That's not to say my comprehension level is low. I don't think it's too low. In fact, I once took a test and found that I should be able to comprehend anything. Maybe the test was wrong.