How to Write With Simple Words

You have almost certainly acquired some bad writing habits that you will want to fix before you have a deadline on your college application essays. Here is a remedial brief on how to improve your writing so that it gets to and makes a point that sticks with your readers.

TLDR

• Communicative writing has a point.
• Communicative writing is simple, clear, elegant, and engaging, prioritized in that order.
• Use common words when communicating to an anonymous audience: this is simple and clear.
• But use very specific emotions when communicating your feelings: this is elegant and engaging.

How To Choose Words

1. Prefer using shorter, 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. VandeHei (2022) also has a strong preference for shorter words: single syllables pack a distinct punch. By way of example, consider Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers…”
   • You may also choose to check your writing with a tool like the NGSL Profiler to help you identify your unusual words and replace them with more-common synonyms.
   • The Hemingway app also promises similar functionality done smarter (it tries to upsell you to AI for text-spewing 🤮) but it failed the first word-choice test I gave it.
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 (“Emotional intelligence! Swoon!“), 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.

Where You May Go Wrong

The first way a young writer goes wrong is by trying to dominate their reader instead of communicating with them. Lakoff and Johnson’s research (2011) indicates that from a young age you learn that people with power and authority use words you do not understand: priests use Latin, wizards invoke arcane terms, adults discuss “the economy.” In order to gain access to adult power and authority, you mimic their use of unfamiliar words well enough for adults to hold you in higher regard than your peers. Clever students will reasonably believe that they will be rewarded for masking their ignorance with confidently produced non-communicative language even/especially if they do not know what they are talking about—and then make a career of this behavior in Management Consulting. But as Kurt Vonnegut explained in Cat’s Cradle (1998), “any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan”: you want to ensure that your reader gets to your impressive point so you should avoid distracting them with impressive words.

The other common way a young writer goes wrong is by not having a point to get to. This is a side-effect of being taught to use writing as a means of “self-expression” which returns us to the simple problem: if you do not care where you are going, then it does not matter which direction you walk in. While it is true that writing for self-expression can help you disgorge your haystack of thoughts that you can then try to find the needle of your point in, the process of writing for yourself and writing for communication are different enough to invoke Brooks’s advice on planning: “plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow” (1995, p. 101). Once you identify the point you want to make from your unstructured writing, it is entirely reasonable to start over, focused entirely on the point you want to communicate (Wexler, 2019).

Specifically relevant to writing for college admissions is this key point: you have to have the confidence that your day-to-day self belongs at the university you will be attending. If you are bumbling around in “self-expression” or, worse, treating the admissions readers as a mysterious Other that you must impress, enchant, and beguile by seeming like somebody far more amazing than yourself, then you—the actual day-to-day you—will not be a good fit for the selective university you are applying to. Write to communicate your point to yourself first and trust that it will resonate with the readers you ought to be reaching (Zinsser, 2021).

Updated Revisionary 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. If your big point is not at the top of your writing, drag it there.
4. Remove or simplify a word in every other sentence to sharpen your precision and your feeling.
5. Repeat the previous step until all your points are clear with a good pace between them.

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 onomatopoeic “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. You want your reader to get your point, not get mired in your vocabulary until their attention is depleted (Sierra, 2015). 

References

Brooks, F. P. (1995). The mythical man-month: Essays on software engineering (Ed. d’anniversaire). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

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

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2011). Metaphors we live by: With a new afterword (6. print). Univ. of Chicago Press.

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

VandeHei, J., Allen, M., & Schwartz, R. (2022). Smart brevity: The power of saying more with less. Workman Publishing.

Vonnegut, K. (1998). Cat’s Cradle: A Novel. Dell Publishing.

Wexler, N. (2019). The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–And How to Fix It. Penguin Publishing Group.

Zinsser, W. (2021). On writing well: The classical guide to writing nonfiction (Seventh edition, revised and updated, 30th anniversary edition). Collins.