No suspense here. Long and complicated words don’t impress, they lose audiences. We are bombarded with information in every minute we spend awake; your readers don’t have time to waste.

It is usually a great honour to be asked to write about a subject you are considered an expert in, but, unless you are writing for a very specialised publication, most of your readers will not be half as technical as you are.

I find that the usage of long and complicated words is usually the result of one of two categories of “writers”:

The Expert – To become an expert in a field it is not a requirement for you to write lovely flowing English. It would help, but you can usually find a good enough editor to fix your writing before having it published.

In my years in publishing I had to work with a lot of these. Was it worth the effort? Yes – every time. I would sometimes spend hours editing an article to bring it up to scratch and to “translate” it into appealing English, but there was no other way to get access to the subject matter. Nowadays I sometimes translate geek-ese into English in my day job. Once again I don’t mind doing it because I know that whoever wrote the original text was employed to program not to write.

The Idiot – You don’t usually find these writing articles, but you find a lot of them hogging your inbox with long and convoluted emails when all they need to write can be condensed into a few words. They will name-drop with long and “technical” words, but more often than not use them in the wrong context.

The solution:

The one cliché to rule them all – KISS, or keep it simple, stupid. You impress people much more when they can understand what you are trying to say. At the bottom if it all lies the same message of my earlier post about design. We write to communicate, and should let your content shine out through the words. If you need to impress by using big words, then you should reconsider whatever you were going to write.

(#7 of 366 X 2012 project)