I read a short post over at the Lawyerist and it piqued my interest enough to check out the original post that inspired it. In the interests of full disclosure, however, I will admit that I haven’t read the full study on which the latter post was based, but I feel that I have a sufficient understanding of the researcher’s (and Sam’s) position to offer my own two cents. Which is, frankly, that it does not demonstrate anything anyone with any great familiarity with written prose does not already know.
My first gripe is about the tendency to overgeneralize from a single study to all possible cases. Admittedly, this is probably not the first study to suggest that the unrestrained use of large and complex words can have the unintended consequence of making you appear less sophisticated than you were attempting to seem. Other such studies, however, are no where to be seen in either post. Indeed, we are meant to simply take this one study to demonstrate the existence of the grave social ill that is sesquipedalianism.
My real concern, though, is that this drive for ‘simplicity’ actually compromises meaning. As the author of the original post admits, there are no straight substitutions when it comes to synonyms; no matter how close the two words are, their connotations implicit meanings, if not their denotations explicit meanings, may vary greatly. Since this is so, it suggests that those who, with some warped, pedantic glee, slavishly obey the demand for simplicity may very well not say what they mean to.
Similarly, it is also worth noting that the use of certain words alone should not be taken as a sign of pretension, as one commentator of the original post has suggested. The last time I checked, precision had yet to be equated with pretention, though the two, for some reason, are often conflated when it comes to the use of language. Simplicity for simplicity’s sake is, as far as I am concerned, just as pretentious. It implies, if nothing else, that those who forgo this vaunted simplicity are merely doing it to spite those lesser minded fools who, really, we should all do a better job of including.
What I do accept, however, is Sam’s assertion that the use of both jargon and unnecessary Latinate phrases does nothing for the meaning which you, as a lawyer, are trying to convey in court. This much was said by Orwell in his famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. With Orwell I would argue that in many cases there is an English word or phrase that, in many circumstances, will serve better than an equivalent, though foreign derived, term. This applies to the use of jargon in may cases as well; it is simply not useful. The exception, of course, is when one is communicating with those who are already in the know, so to speak. That is, if one is discussing a matter with those who share the same terms, then the use of jargon and Latin phrases can actually expedite and clarify communication, as in the case of commonly accepted stipulatory definitions. Obviously this is not so when communicating with a jury, as prior knowledge of the judicial systems is grounds for exclusion, but it does suggest that simplicity is a matter of discretion rather than deontology.
What I would really like to know, however, is that readers of the modified passages (link) are actually judging that the writer is less intelligent solely on the basis of the length or obscurity of her words. Perhaps it is their own practice, as college students, of padding their sentences with little understood words that leads them to the conclusion that anyone who uses such words must be similarly unintelligent (or, at least, not as intelligent as they might appear). Or perhaps the students are simply intelligent enough to know when the individual meanings of the words do not match up with the presumed meaning of the sentence or paragraph as a whole. If this latter scenario was actually the case, then it might suggest that use larger and more complex words alone does not necessarily make you seem less intelligent. Rather, it would be their inappropriate use that gives the lie to the attempted deceit.
If this were indeed the case, then it would also suggest that when it comes to language, much as it does in project management, you can pick any two of three categories, but no more. That is, one can be both clear and brief, or clear and simple, or even simple and brief; but you cannot have it all. Perhaps we should accept that, in some cases, simplicity is indeed the best option; in others, however, it can do as much, if not more, violence to the clarity of what we are trying to say (see above) than a more loquacious approach. This is important because if clarity is not the purpose of the undertaken communication, then it probably should not have been undertaken at all – simple or not. I would suspect, therefore, that it is was actually the clarity of the piece that was compromised by the haphazard and, I dare say, lackadaisical substitution of synonyms in the original study. Brevity may indeed by the heart of wit, but just as often as simplicity is the enemy of clarity, clarity is the rival of shortness (to be simple about it).
Perhaps the simple rule, then, would be to aim for clarity and brevity above all else and allow simplicity to develop organically, if at all, as an appealing side effect. Ultimately, clarity is in the eye of the beholder, and in some cases to be clear means to be simply, but not necessarily. Similarly, sometimes to be brief one must not be too complicated, but again, not always. At the end of the day, then, it seems that we are back to where we were before the study – left struggling to know when it is and when it is not appropriate to sacrifice clarity and/or brevity upon the alter of simplicity and vice versa the other way around.
