OK here is an article that will give you an idea of what I’m posting.
“Study: Using big words needlessly makes you seem stupider
Everyone knows how college students will try to make themselves sound smarter by reaching for the thesaurus and using big, ponderous words they barely understand. But now a new study shows that readers can see through this. Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, took a handful of writing samples and used a thesaurus to replace the simple words with needlessly flowery ones. As the Bad Language blog notes:
He created a "highly complex" version of each original text by replacing each noun, verb and adjective in it with the longest synonym. This is the kind of writing by thesaurus that many business people and techies employ when they want to sound knowledgeable and important or because they think writing like they speak will make them sound lightweight.
Then Oppenheimer gave all the writing samples -- the original, simple ones and the modified, flowery ones -- to 71 students to evaluate. The result? As the grandiosity and complexity of the language increased, the judges' estimation of the intelligence of the authors decreased. Oppenheimer wrote up his results in a paper with the gorgeously ironic title "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."
His findings make perfect sense when you think about the nature of language. Every sentence and paragraph of writing is an organic whole; a writer's style is, too. Taking a sentence and swapping in synonyms plucked from a thesaurus is bound to warp the meaning and clarity of a sentence, because synonyms are not mathematical equals: They all have slightly different shadings. Describe someone as "angry" and it means one thing; describe them as "choleric" or "furious" or "splenetic" -- all synonyms offered up by Thesaurus.com -- and you're saying something slightly different. When an essay is filled with these sort of swapped-in synonyms, it winds up having Frankensteinian seams: You can feel its cognitive artificiality, its constipated straining to convey a higher meaning. No wonder the judges thought these essays seemed dumber.”
And a cite for it- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 075447.htm
I am just putting forward that it is noticeable in these forums as well and that it generally clouds the meanings of the 'big', 'hard' or obscure words that are used. I spoke to Fand about posting this and for firsts it is only in 'writing tips' 'cos it wouldn't really go anywhere else in the forums.
I think that people genuinely incorporate a larger synonym instead of a more appropriate shorter word because they are under the thinking that this makes them seem smarter. And what is wrong with this?
1: People trying to look smarter means they aspire to be smarter.
2: This practice is often the only way people can get into the habit of using 'big' words.
Both i think are positive outputs and why not use the largest word you can find?
I think it has a few downsides, but the big one is the 'lexical pollution', larger words that are used are often chosen simply because the meaning that the word suggests or implies is the same as the first word that sprung to mind. Whether this connotation happens to be one you already knew or one you pull from a thesaurus on the spot, it may be for a specific context that you were not aware of or that the thesaurus didn't provide (they often don't). This leads to the lexical pollution, and then any one who reads the post or story afterward has a slightly distorted idea of what said word means.
I only notice it slightly and like i said i think this enthusiasm to be seen as smarter is nothing but a good thing, but as this is a site for young writers i think this is worth noting.
Dan x
p.s. please don't lynch me, please don't lynch me, please don't lynch me!
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