Keep it simple, appear smarter

Of the many personal statements written by our year 13s, many I read are scattered with long, complex words, some of which I often do not understand myself! When asked what they mean, it isn't particularly rare to find out the student didn't know either. They often admit to using the synonym feature in their word processor to make them sound 'more intelligent'. It seems, however, that they may be wasting time searching for more imaginative words with the intention of sounding more knowledgable. They may have been far better to keep the simple word after all!

Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA found (in this study) that using shorter words actually makes you seem more intelligent and this article explaining Oppenheimer's work by Fast Company gives a great review of the study and the findings. He and his team conducted studies that found that the use of longer words in texts had the exact opposite effect of making you seem smarter to the reader. Whilst we think longer words make you look clever, Daniel Oppenheimer found that the more longer words you use, with more syllables and with more letters for example, the less intelligent you appear when people estimate how smart the author is in relation to the actual words the writer has chosen to use!

He and his team put college admission essays through a computer programme that replaced specific simple or short words with a longer, more complex word that meant the same thing and found that people believed the authors of the essays were less competent than if the author had used the shorter words. The reverse was true when longer words were replaced with shorter words; they made the author seem more intelligent.

Why? Well there could be a few reasons behind this but the article states the reason "... is that the ease of processing information is strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability. "To the extent that you use long words, you make it more disfluent to read your prose, people will judge you disfavorably," says Oppenheimer."

So, when writing your personal statements, essays or application letters, don't look for long, complex words to give you the perception of being more clever, chances are it could do the exact opposite.

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