Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry spent eight years teaching businesspeople how to write better. As he told Time magazine:

“I’d lecture a bunch of chemists or engineers about the importance of not saying ‘It would be appreciated if you would contact the undersigned by telephone at your earliest possible convenience,’ and instead saying ‘Please call me as soon as you can.’ That was revealed wisdom to these people.”

Take a tip from Barry: Avoid multisyllabic exhibitions of verbosity. Use short words.

What’s wrong with long words?

Why avoid long words? Because they:

1. Slash readability.

Word length, along with sentence length, are the top two indicators of reading ease, writes readability expert William H. DuBay in Unlocking Language (PDF). For more than 80 years, researchers have proven in the lab — again and again — that short, simple words increase readability.

Here’s what the researchers found:

• Long words are harder to read. In 1928, Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne of Winnetka, Illinois, published 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read. Of their 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read, the top three centered on word familiarity.
• Vocabulary top predictor of difficulty. “Vocabulary load is the most important [accompaniment to] difficulty,” found Irving Lorge, a psychologist at Columbia University Teachers College, in 1944.
• Short, simple words boost readability. Shortening and simplifying words reduced the reading grade level from 11th to 5th in a 1981 study by researchers Thomas Duffy and Paula Kabance.

2. Reduce comprehension.

The shorter the words, the easier your copy is to read. Indeed, virtually every readability index uses word length as one measure of reading ease — or difficulty.

• Familiar words are easier to understand. Comprehension increases with word familiarity and ease, found readability researcher Ralph Ojemann in 1934. Word difficulty was among the top four factors he found that reduce understanding.
• Hard words reduce comprehension. The more difficult words a passage included, the harder it is to understand, found Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale in 1934. The top two predictors of comprehension, they discovered, are the amount of jargon and the number of long or unfamiliar words.
• Common words boost understanding. Using only the percentage of common words and average number of words per sentence, Dale and Chall in 1948 published a readability formula that predicts comprehension with a 92% accuracy rate.
• One-syllable words increase comprehension. Shorter words increase understanding, found Edmund B. Coleman in his 1965 study measuring the percentage of one-syllable words.
• Word familiarity increases understanding. Word characteristics including functionality, familiarity and length affect comprehension, found readability expert G. R. Klare  in a 1976 review of 36 readability studies.

As Skip Boyer, the late executive producer and director of executive communication at Best Western International Inc. wrote: “Readers may know that utilize means use and optimum means best. But why make them translate?”

3. Suck the color from your piece.

Small words are compelling, as well as clear, because they’re often concrete. That is, they describe things rather than ideas. That helps our readers visualize your information so they understand it faster and remember it longer.

Let’s test that: Which do you see? A visual-duration-sensing apparatus? Or a clock?

4. Sound stuffy and bureaucratic.

When a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, “We are endeavoring to construct a more inclusive society,” FDR changed it to, “We’re going to make a country in which no one is left out.”

No wonder. Simpler words are more accessible — and less self-important.

Corporate communicator Chris Winters calls using stuffy, bureaucratic words the “Look, ma! I’m writing!” syndrome.

5. Don’t get shared.

The average length of a word in a tweet that gets retweeted is 1.62 syllables, according to a study by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella. Want to get the word out on Twitter? Use mostly one- and two-syllable words.

6. Make you sound pompous and dense.

Using stuffy words might make you sound stuffy. But it won’t make you sound smarter. In fact, people who use big words when smaller ones will do actually sound less intelligent, according to research at Stanford University.

7. Make you seem dishonest.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote English novelist George Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language.’ “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns … instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Orwell also wrote: “Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.”

Still writing “single-operation computer architecture unit of data bus”? Stop it.

Small wonder

“Sure,” you say, “Ann Wylie can write using mostly one- and two-syllable words. She has little ideas. But my big ideas can only be expressed in big words.”

But one of the biggest ideas in the history of our country was expressed in the Gettysburg Address. Of the 235 words Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address (that’s fewer than the number on the back of a potato chip package today), 174 of them have only one syllable.

So we can express big ideas with small words. In fact, short words express ideas faster and to more people than long words.

And isn’t that what the best writers aim to do?

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Three professors from Texas A&M University and the University of the Andes aimed to find out whether concrete images or abstract images were more understandable.

First, the professors (Sadoski, Goetz and Rodriguez, 2000) crafted a series of passages. Each passage was 56 words long and written at about the same level of readability.

Half of the passages were abstract:

The other half were concrete:

Then the researchers asked 40 graduate students to read the passages and rate them for how interesting and easy to understand they were.

The students rated the concrete copy more interesting and understandable.

1. Concrete detail is easier to understand.

In fact, there was almost a one-to-one correlation between how concrete a passage was and how easy it was to understand, the researchers said.

Next, the researchers wrote a series of abstract and concrete headlines for each of the 56-word passages. They included:

Then they asked the graduate students to rate the headlines for how interesting and easy to understand they were.

The students rated the concrete headlines much more understandable and interesting.

“Using more concrete language and content,” Sadoski, Goetz and Rodriguez write, “should have positive effects in making … text more comprehensible, interesting and memorable.”

Concrete headlines are also more memorable.

2. Vivid descriptions boost learning.

We’ve known this for years.

In the early 19th century, German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart said that interest leads to understanding, learning and memory — and even inspires readers to learn more.

For some 200 years, researchers, philosophers and communicators have found Herbart’s link between interest and learning to be true.

One of those researchers is Suzanne Hidi, associate member at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s Centre for Applied Cognitive Science. She reviewed the research connecting interest with learning.

“Interesting copy,” Hidi found, is:

• Concrete. Concrete images show instead of tell, turning ideas into things. They are also filled with action and images.
• Emotional. Concrete imagery includes human interest, narrative action and “life themes” readers can identify with.
• Novel. Concrete detail is surprising or unexpected.

Here, for instance, are some of the concrete, interesting sentences that researchers have studied:

• The huge gorilla smashed the bus with its fist. (Anderson, 1982)
• When a Click Beetle is on its back, it flips itself into the air and lands right side up while it makes a clicking noise. (Garner et al., 1989)
• When a fly moves its wings about 200 times in a second, you hear a buzzing sound. (Garner et al., 1989)
• No advertising is allowed on Swedish television, and there are no commercial stations. (Hidi & Baird, 1983)
• Adult wolves carry food home in their stomachs and bring it up again or regurgitate it for the young cubs to eat. It’s the wolf version of canned baby food. (Hidi & Baird, 1983)
• Thomas Edison became the most famous inventor of all time even though he left school when he was only 6 years old. (Hidi & Baird, 1988)
• A canary can also bluff by playing dead. A frightened canary may go limp in someone’s hand. (Hidi & Baird, 1983)
• The Battle of Trafalgar was the greatest naval victory in British history, and it was the war for Great Britain. (Wade & Adams, 1990)
• [Lady Emma Hamilton] fell in love with the battered, one-eyed, one-armed naval hero and became his mistress. (Wade & Adams, 1990)

Concrete imagery, according to Hidi’s review of the literature:

• Encourages reading (Hidi & Baird, 1986).
• Improves comprehension (Hidi & Baird, 1986; Bernstein, 1955).
• Boosts learning (Hidi & Baird, 1986; Shirey and Reynolds, 1988).
• Increases recall (Hidi & Baird, 1988).
• Helps people come up with bigger, better, more creative ideas (Bernstein, 1955).

Nearly 45 years of research proves it: Concrete details help readers understand; abstract images aren’t so helpful. For instance:

• The entire incoming first-year class of a college participated in a study where researchers rewrote passages from American history textbooks to make them more concrete. Students understood the revised, concrete passages much better than the original ones. They also rated the revised passages significantly more interesting (Wharton, 1980).
• Students understood and remembered concrete words (PDF) better than abstract language. Concrete words included aisle, ceremony, scene and pile. Abstract ones included pride, theory, time and truth (Sadoski, Goetz, Stricker and Burdenski, 2003).
• Students understood the plot and theme of a story better if the words painted a mental picture of a key event in the story. (Sadoski 1983, 1985).
• Undergraduates understood history textbook passages better when the message was more concrete and full of images. They also found concrete passages much more interesting. (Wharton).
• Abstract language is more vague, and that makes it harder to understand and remember, researchers have found. (B.J. O’Neill and Allan Paivo).

So how can you make your abstract ideas concrete?

3. Word pictures boost understanding by 43%.

Readers don’t understand abstract words — those that refer to ideas — very well, according to a study by Prabu David and Jagdeep Kang. But, according to the study, if you:

• Use concrete, visual words — words that paint pictures in readers’ heads — you can increase understanding by 43%.
• Add an actual picture to a word picture, you can increase understanding by 76%.

For the study, researchers used an infographic and accompanying text from a USA Today article about the effects of nicotine on the body. They tested abstract copy and concrete copy and found that word pictures increased understanding dramatically.

Why? Because concrete imagery — word pictures — paint pictures in your readers’ minds.

Help readers see with concrete information.

That’s no surprise. After all, we say “I see” to mean “I understand.”

So help them see.

Turn ideas into things: Make your message more vivid and visual with concrete information, and people will literally see what you mean.

Are you turning ideas into things? Or are you hoping to gain understanding with abstractions?

____

Sources:

Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Winter 1990, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 549-571

Prabu David and Jagdeep Kang, “Pictures, High-Imagery News Language and News Recall,” Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 1998

Mark Sadoski, Ernest T. Goetz and Maximo Rodriguez, “Engaging Texts: Effects of Concreteness on Comprehensibility, Interest, and Recall in Four Text Types.” Journal of Educational Psychology 92, 2000, pp. 85-95

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