Why big words make you look stupid

By Caroline Gilmour, copywriter

As a copywriter I go on a lot about jargon and marketing speak, usually while shouting at my screen and anyone else anywhere near me. All of us copywriters do. It’s our point of difference and we’re going to cling on to it, damn it.

There is a good reason behind it. Words have a history. When they’re rolled around in the mouths of a lot of people over a long expanse of time they lose their dustiness and shapelessness and acquire a nice sheen, like pearls. Old words have deep, well defined meanings. A word like ‘rage’, for example, hits you straight away. It’s there. Rage. Arrrgggh. Even a word like ‘chav’, which is new but has already been spoken billions of times, has achieved the pearl-like sheen of definition.

This is why words that only live in whitepapers, briefings, academic papers and trade journals, fail to communicate anything above their literal meaning. People don’t speak them every day. They don’t know how to use them or wear them. Replace ‘chav’ with ‘person of a lower socio-economic status’ and what do you have? Nothing, really. I bet you didn’t even read that properly. These words don’t make you stop.

This is really important in PR. Most of the stuff we write is generally skimmed in the first instance – press releases, invites, press articles, mailers, blog posts. What makes skimmers stop and read are the words that count: ‘chav’, ‘rage’, ‘battle’ ‘sickness’ ‘fat’ ‘old’ ‘angry’ ‘harsh’ ‘drunk’ ‘happy’ ‘hunger’ etc. Words such as ‘immersion’ ‘integration’ ‘enabling’ ‘leveraging’ ‘positioning’ and ‘audiences’ are Teflon words – nothing sticks to them. The eyes just skim right over.

And this, I thought, was the top and bottom of it, until I read about this study by Daniel Oppenheimer, which puts another spin on it. What he’s saying is that using long, overly academic or florid words makes you look a bit desperate and pretentious, like a student who has picked through a thesaurus for their first piece of English Language homework.

The PR equivalent of this is writing like a corporate robot just because you think it lends you a business-like demeanor. Writing like this doesn’t make you look like the Economist, it makes you look like someone who hasn’t yet learnt to stop using the language of your dissertation. This doesn’t mean you can’t use ‘long’ words, or words that you would never use in a pub-setting, for example. Just don’t use words that, when you examine them, are practically meaningless and add very little to core of what you’re trying to say. Because it makes you look like a try-hard.