Devoured by the Saurus

The overuse of complex vocabulary is an obstacle to comprehension by which I simply cannot abide. The March Atlantic offers some good scientific evidence for the uselessness of this gambit:

Insecure writers tend to reach for the thesaurus, often to replace a simple word with a complex one. Long-suffering English teachers have always said that this ploy never works—and now there’s proof. Researchers asked seventy-one Stanford undergraduates to evaluate various writing samples; the lexicon in the samples was systematically varied, with each judge getting either a “moderately complex” or a “highly complex” version of each sample. (The researchers created the highly complex versions by replacing every noun, verb, and adjective with the longest possible synonym.) The highly complex samples may have made for muddy reading, but the effect they had on readers is clear: as complexity increased, the judges’ estimation of the author’s intelligence declined.

So there! This science gets dropped in an article by Daniel M. Oppenheimer in Applied Cognitive Psychology, one which carries the brilliant title, "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

(As an aside: I especially appreciate this conclusion after discovering an apparent instance of plagiarism in a paper I recently graded: the student tipped me off to her illicit borrowing by committing heinous crimes with the thesaurus, like changing "the Soviet sphere of influence" in the original to "the Soviet ball of influence" in "her" paper.)