Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly
Oppenheimer tested a strategy most students admit to using: making your vocabulary more complicated so you sound cleverer. Across five experiments he found it backfires. When the same essay was rewritten with longer words in place of shorter ones, readers judged its author less intelligent, and this held regardless of how good the original essay was and of what readers expected before reading. The explanation he offers is processing fluency. Text that is harder to take in feels harder, and readers attribute that difficulty to the writer rather than to the writing. A fourth experiment separated the two by keeping the words identical and simply printing the text in a hard-to-read font, which produced the same penalty, since the only thing that changed was ease of reading. A fifth found that people can discount fluency when the cause of the difficulty is obvious and irrelevant, and that they then overcorrect in the opposite direction. This is the reference for our position on plain language.
Oppenheimer tested a strategy most students admit to using: making your vocabulary more complicated so you sound cleverer. Across five experiments he found it backfires. When the same essay was rewritten with longer words in place of shorter ones, readers judged its author less intelligent, and this held regardless of how good the original essay was and of what readers expected before reading. The explanation he offers is processing fluency. Text that is harder to take in feels harder, and readers attribute that difficulty to the writer rather than to the writing. A fourth experiment separated the two by keeping the words identical and simply printing the text in a hard-to-read font, which produced the same penalty, since the only thing that changed was ease of reading. A fifth found that people can discount fluency when the cause of the difficulty is obvious and irrelevant, and that they then overcorrect in the opposite direction. This is the reference for our position on plain language.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
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Experiments 1 to 3 manipulated text complexity and found a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence, mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 manipulated fluency directly: texts in hard-to-read fonts were judged to come from less intelligent authors.
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1178
DOI: 10.1002/acp.1178