Note to Self

From Shape magazine, March 2004 issue, p. 30:

"If you want your writing to sound intelligent, leave the thesaurus on the shelf and stick to the simplest words to get your point across. Writers who use basic vocabulary are viewed as smarter than those who choose complicated, multisyllable words when shorter ones would do, according to a study by Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a graduate student in cognitive psychology at Stanford University in California. 'The longer and more complex the words, the harder something is to read and comprehend, so people like it less and think the author is less intelligent,' he says."

This is both hard to believe and counterintuitive. The article doesn't give a citation to the original study, so I decided to try to find more information. I'm not a reference librarian, so my first choice is usually (and always, when I'm at home) a search engine, so that's where I went. With "vocabulary daniel oppenheimer stanford" as my search terms, I got 213 hits in .25 seconds. The first was a reference to an article in NZoom, New Zealand Health News, about the study itself. There's definitely more to it than the above paragraph indicated.

"'I think it's important to point out that this study is not about problems with using long words--it's about problems with using long words needlessly,' Oppenheimer said. 'If the best way to say something involves using a complex word, then by all means do so. But if there are several equally valid ways of expressing your ideas, you should go with the simpler one,' he noted."

Ah. I feel better. I'd still like to get the whole story, but it could be a while. So far, the results of the study aren't published; Oppenheimer gave the paper at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference.