Writing: Simple Words

“…any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Use common words when communicating to an anonymous audience. You want your reader to get your point, not get mired in your vocabulary until their attention is depleted (Sierra, 2015). 

As previously noted, you may want to use difficult words because you have been listening to adults using difficult words your whole life (so far). But your feelings are misleading you: your small self was struggling to learn the words and you now remember the struggle, not the specific words.

You want to communicate with your reader, not to make them struggle, so prefer simple, commonly-used words… with certain exceptions.

How To Choose Words

1. Prefer using common words, particularly on your initial draft. Do not distract from the point you are making with your choice of words. Common word lists have existed for quite some time and have now evolved into Large Language Models, so it should be possible to find a modern thesaurus that will help you simplify words rather than choose a harder one. [I will be looking for a lightweight un-thesaurus app to help with this, have not seen one yet.]
2. Use an uncommon word when you need more precision in your writing. Most specifically: adults are impressed with teenagers who are precise in their feelings, so use a feelings wheel to dial in on exactly how happy/sad/angry you are in your anecdotes.
3. Use a less-common term of art to establish belonging with a specific audience. There is ⚠️risk of miscommunication⚠️ here — for example, discussing “perverse incentives” should work well with economists, but may end badly with psychiatrists — so ensure your writing stays aligned to your intent before making this sort of choice.
4. Use a less common word to break up monotony due to repetition of a specific word or you can readily achieve a stylistic effect (for my part, I am a sucker for alliteration). This is where word choice becomes a question of taste, which is to say, of flavor: prefer to use a few  special words (spices) that will be distinctive when consumed rather than many that will overstimulate to the point of confusion.

Example From A Master

Consider Danusha Laméris’s poem, “Feeding the Worms” from Bonfire Opera (2020, p.67).

It is only ten lines long and the first six lines contain only two unusual words: the onomatopoeiac “ecstasy,” and “permeating” to alliterate with “pores”. These are lines that can be lightly read; Ms. Laméris expects you to be breezing through them. But then the back portion of the poem is freighted with “menial,” “vulgar,” “sublime,” and “decadent” and you can almost feel your brain slowing down as Ms. Laméris’s words stick to it. But then her last line hits clean and shoots through that muck that’s clogging your mind, hitting you not with her words but with her Big Idea, simply phrased.

You can feel how Ms. Laméris’s choice of language changes your experience with the poem. With this in mind, your word selection should also be considering how your audience — teachers now, admissions readers tomorrow, professors later — will be consuming your (and your peer group’s) writing. Generally you want to be making things quick and easy for your reader (because they will be reading an awful lot) except for your sharp points where you want to slow them down so your Big Idea can stick in them.

Process

With this in mind, your writing process might now look something like:

1. Get your words out onto paper in as simple and straightforward a way as possible.
2. Highlight your impact points and the specific bits you want your reader to take away (while deleting anything that strays off-topic).
3. Go back and replace one word in (roughly) every other sentence to sharpen your precision and your feeling and/or to control the pace of your reader so your impact points don’t get glossed over.

References

Laméris, D. (2020). Bonfire Opera. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Sierra, K. (2015). Badass: Making users awesome (1. ed). O’Reilly.