The 5 myths of workplace writing: #3 Long words are more persuasive

1. Why writers seem to love long words

People believe they need long words, and it’s not surprising because we’ve been encouraged to think it. If we don’t have them, we’ll crave them, and if we do have them we’ll be reluctant to give them up. But does this fixation have anything to do with the reader?

People think they need long words 

It’s very common in a pre-workshop questionnaire for someone to say they want 2 things:

• to expand their vocabulary
• to enhance their persuasiveness.

When people say they want a bigger vocabulary, they of course mean that they want to add a bunch of longer words. I can’t recall anyone saying they were short of shorter words.

And in the minds of most, these 2 goals are linked: ‘If I have a bigger vocabulary that includes longer words, I’ll be more persuasive.’ I don’t agree.

I’ve read thousands of analytical documents – briefing notes, board papers, proposals – and I’ve never finished one and thought, ‘They would have had me if only they’d pumped up the syllable count.’ But I understand why people think this.

We’ve been encouraged to think this 

In school, did you ever get a gold star for using a simple word?

No, we were always rewarded for using the longer, less common word or phrase:

• for writing ‘ascertained’ rather than ‘assessed’
• for using ‘terminated’ rather than ‘ended’
• for ‘undertaking an analysis’ rather than ‘analysing’.

So, with a well-thumbed thesaurus at our side, writing essays involved recruiting as many long words as we could, and editing was about scratching out any words that were too readily recognisable.

Now, apparently encouraging students to expand their vocabulary can be key to developing their intellect more generally.

But I don’t ever remember being told that we should expand our vocabularies during our developmental phase, and then prefer the shorter word if wanted to be understood.

So, like most students, I left school with the impression that ‘longer’ equalled ‘better’. And having acquired these long words, most of us are very reluctant to give them up.

We’ve become very attached to our long words 

Let’s be clear. I like long words. I have a decent vocabulary, and there are quite a few longer entries in there that set off alarm bells in readability software.

I will, though, use these words because they allow me to bring precision, variety, vividness and even musicality to my writing.

So, I’m not suggesting we should entirely deny ourselves the wondrous range that English allows.

But let’s be honest. Is that the only reason we like these longer words? Isn’t a teensy bit of it tied up with ego?

Human beings tend to like things that allow us to feel superior to others, and swinging our big vocabularies around is one of the ways we like to do this.

That bulging bag of big words can become part of our identity, and we can react badly if someone suggests that we should lighten up on the lexicon.

In fact, in our workshops, we are sometimes accused of dumbing down the language.

To that, I respond, ‘Why do we write our documents?’

We write them because we want the reader to know, think, feel or do something.

If that is our goal, we shouldn’t be choosing words because they please us.

We need to be thinking about what will work for the reader.

2. Why readers don’t share our love of long words 

As it turns out, readers are less attached to those long words than we are. Decision-makers aren’t demanding them, organisations have cooled on them and even scientists are looking for a breather.

Decision-makers don’t want big words

We must get something like 90% of our work because of decision-makers. We are typically brought in by CEOs, board members and top level bureaucrats because they are tired of reading – or more to the point, being unable to read – important documents.

Vocabulary is not their primary concern – that’s generally structure – but overly complex words are definitely on their hitlist.

We’ve trained a lot at NSW Health and ran workshops during COVID. During that time, I asked participants to consider their Minister, Brad Hazzard.

I asked them to picture him in his office at 10 pm, reading a briefing note about how he should respond to the pandemic. Was it likely that he would be saying to himself, ‘I love this briefing note – it has so many multisyllabic words!!!’

No decision-maker is thinking that. The problems and issues are already complex enough. They don’t need the challenge compounded by long words.

Organisations want to lower syllable counts

We use and recommend the Fry scale of readability. It tells us how many years of education a reader needs for various combinations of syllable count and sentence length.

Most organisations want internal documents to be readable for people with 10–12 years of education, but they’ll want it to be more like 6–8 years if those documents are for the public.

Yet, if we audit the documents of most organisations, where do you think they sit on the Fry scale?

It’s not uncommon for them to be literally off the scale – the syllable counts and sentence lengths are so high, the reader would need at least a PhD to read them on the first pass.

To be clear, when we talk about readability, we’re not just talking about if the reader can read them. We’re assessing how easily they can read them – what sort of load are we putting on the brain of the reader?

The harder their brains are working to process the words, the lower the bandwidth they have to assess the ideas.

Even scientists prefer shorter words

But surely complex subjects demand longer words? Yes and no.

In certain fields, like medicine and science for example, there are limits on how much you can shorten your words. There will be very specific terms – often Latin or Greek in origin – that you simply can’t change. We accept that.

But because there are some words we can’t shorten, we need to work even harder in scientific documents to shorten others and ease the load on our readers.

Do these shorter words in any way diminish the professional credibility of scientific texts? Let’s ask the scientists.

John Kirkman, in his book Good Style: Writing for Science and Technology, ran a readability experiment.

He gave 2,781 scientists 2 different versions of a research paper – 1 written in traditional scientific style and the other written in plain language.

Kirkman asked them 2 questions. The first asked which style did they prefer to read for scientific texts. About 74% of respondents said they preferred the plain language version.

That’s a strong endorsement, but the second question produced an even more interesting result. He then asked which style did they think other scientists would prefer to read? The plain language version still came out on top – in fact it was still more than twice as popular. But only 57% said they thought others would also prefer it.

About 74% preferred plain language, but 57% thought others would share their view? What does this tell us?

It tells us what we said at the start. That we’ve been led to believe that long words are better, so we continue to use them even though we know they’re harder to read.

3. How to write persuasively