Verbal overgrowth

Superlative writing is imbued with an unornamented elegance rather than appropriating a sesquipedalian demeanor. Or put better, the best writing is simple, not complex. The advice here is: Don’t be pretentious and puffed up with your vocabulary or style. It's all over the essays on the hub, this strange top-button-done-up register.

I am sure many of you have right-clicked and selected 'Synonyms' (or for the geekier, Shift+F7) thinking that you were cunningly upping your essay’s intellectual prowess.

You are not alone. 86% of Stanford undergrads admitted to doing the same. The figure is probably higher once you factor in the dishonest and those in denial.

However, as you should have felt at the start of this post, dressing up complexity as sophistication is annoying, fogging up the clarity of reading.

At best, markers are going to perceive this as immature writing; at worst, as a (deceitful) substitute for actual understanding. In any case, you are not doing yourself any favours.

So, ironically, despite your best attempts at coming across more intelligently you will achieve the precise opposite by injecting some collagen into your words.

Cognitive science supports my point. In Oppenheimer (2006) “[f]ive studies [on undergrads] demonstrate[d] that the loss of fluency due to needless complexity in a text negatively impacts raters’ assessments of the text’s authors.”

In short, readers really won’t like you pimpin' your vocab and style for no good reason. I leave you with this spot-on quotation:

"Fools ignore complexity;
pragmatists suffer it;
experts avoid it;
geniuses remove it."
(Alan Perlis)

(I should add my point is specifically about unnecessary complexity of vocabulary. This is not a diktat against complexity of vocabulary per se because sometimes longer words do communicate meaning more piquantly than their horizontally-challenged siblings. So, as some clever person once said, make it as simple as it can be, and no simpler.)