I’m writing text for some 5x8” fact cards aimed at 12–17 year olds — and not necessarily the above average readers. The card I’m currently on is NOT about sexually transmitted diseases, but it deals with a similarly complex topic, and the card could annoy many parents and teachers if the facts are not phrased accurately but “sensitively.”
And because the format is small, concision is very desirable.
Trying to be accurate, sensitive, and concise while limited to a 6th grade vocabulary is challenging. Very, very challenging.
As a highly successful grant proposal writer for almost 40 years, I communicated with my audiences just fine. When you write grant proposals to private foundations, you have to explain the problems of a specific nonprofit sector to people who sit on bags of money but often (mostly) don’t know anything about that sector and have very short attention spans to boot. My “so what?” was a reaction to the word “risk” in DSeid’s post. I never felt risk entered into it. I used plenty of big words but no industry jargon or acronyms.
The goal of effective communication is not picking the most appropriate word by definition, it is to predict the state of mind of the audience and convey what you want effectively. Most people are usually trying to communicate well, unless they have other motives.
Huh. I would have thought you would have. Certainly I imagine that in the circumstance I would be feeling a sense of risk. There is, in my imaginary grant writing scene, a good amount riding on my ability to calibrate the pitch correctly. If I turn those who are sitting on bags of money off with words that they perceive as pretentious, well, not good. If I am perceived as condescending, as talking down to them, even worse. If I am perceived as unintelligent, still worse yet. I want communicate at most effective level to convince them of our need and worthiness and my organization is depending on me to do so.
Maybe you have such great confidence in you ability to communicate at the correct level that you feel there is no risk. You, having done it well for 40 years, know you will do the job as well as can be done. You fail? Nah. Me, communication goat that I am, I would experience the sense of risk.
Upon reflection, the tone of my post was a bit snippy, and I apologize for that. Your reply was gracious, and I thank you.
But you’ve said it correctly here. One of the things I get/got paid for was knowing exactly the right tone to strike depending on whom I was applying to. In this business (like so many others), experience is everything. So, on that note, *“Hire a geezer!” *
Nah. I dropped a few words and a letter! A “to”, a “the”, and the “r” of “your” … good thing no grant money rides on my writing!
A little real life vignette of this thread … one my adult sons was over last night. He’s been in the working world a few years but has known that at some point he’d possibly go on for more education with major consideration to an MPH with an eye towards policy. He’s now thinking more towards an MSW. Part of his reasoning though (beyond his working world experiences so far, which actually has included some grant writing) is that he is less adept at the math and science than he is on the communication side and, in that explanation, he used the word “plethora” as part of his natural speech. Now that’s not a particularly sesquipedalian word but it is not one that I’d expect to hear, say in a current State of the Union speech … and it amusingly illustrated the point he was making that his background has included lots of reading.
But if he did not know how to (I suspect automatically and without any conscious realization that he does it) “code switch” for the room then his tendency to naturally use words like “plethora” in speech could trigger some of the sort of response that molten has to people who use less common words, even if they understood what he was saying well.
(When I pointed his use of the word out to him as confirmation of what he was saying, he smiled and noted that his favorite word is “syzygy” just because there are so few opportunities to use it as the best possible word. :))
I am a wordsmith, and I like to use the very best appropriate word. It bugs me when people describe someone being mad when they are obviously frustrated.
Then you are communicating and connecting with your audience and doing fine. You’re not taking any risk because, as you said, you know what tone to strike. I got the impression you were saying “so what … if they think your condescending/an egghead/ etc., just talk the way you want to talk” and I was replying to the notion that, no, sometimes it’s important to calibrate your diction to the audience, depending on what outcomes you want and how you want to be perceived.
And that’s fine. I’m an egghead, too, but there are situations in which it’s better for me to speak more in the vernacular than eggheady. It doesn’t seem like it applies to your situation, where there is no perceived disadvantage in being eggheady.
OTOH, many people quickly transition from frustration to anger. Their frustration causes their anger which in turn causes them to be resistant to efforts to reduce their frustration. Because they get focused more on their righteous anger than on the practical issue that created the frustration.
One of the central tenets of customer service is to work around the anger and solve the source of frustration. As the “fixer” you’ve got to focus on the cause, not the symptoms. Not easy.
And I would probably try to think of another way to write the sentence that would avoid the word altogether!
Seriously and in the spirit of Mignon Fogarty’s solution to handling making a name that ends in “Jr.” possessive, as came up for headlines regarding Donald Trump Jr. and his love of Russian dirt.
Either way it is written the plural for “bus” will look weird to many and distract whether one or both of the forms are actually correct. If writing for anything more serious than a messageboard it is probably best to rewrite in way that avoids it!
Maybe I’m a totally clueless person who lives in an NPR bubble, but I can’t imagine a situation in my life where there would be any disadvantage to sounding eggheady. If someone is put off by the way I express myself, I’d probably never know or notice. Unless they hit me or something. I’m not susceptible to insults that might be hurled at my intelligence. Anyway, my usual way of talking and writing is a combination of vernacular, ordinary boring prose, slang, bullshit, and eggheady words.
I’m curious about a situation in your life where there might be any *risk *or even *disadvantage *to sounding “too smart”? Care to give an example (even a hypothetical–but realistic) one?
People just misunderstanding you or pretending to understand you when they don’t would be the obvious one. People perceiving you as “showing off” your intelligence, using $10 words when a 5 cent one will do. And, yes, social rebuke for using big words in the wrong context. I’ve long, long learned to switch how I talk around certain people. A lot of people just don’t like intellectuals or people they perceive as showing off their intelligence.
Plus it can make communication inefficient if you have to explain the words you’re using. Here’s an actual example from my text message last month with my friend who is a photographer and SAT tutor:
Back to my original reply of “so what?” I absolutely do not care if people think I’m showing off. And I’m not even a little bit susceptible to “social rebuke.” Maybe it’s because I’m old.
I suggest you be your smart, big-word self around anyone and everyone and let the devil take the hindmost. Don’t dumb yourself or your speech down because some people don’t understand your eggheady words.
If people who have been to fucking nursing school and graduated with some kind of degree/certification don’t understand the word “antithetical,” then they should turn in their diplomas and get their money back.
Holy crap, there’s enough rampant anti-intellectualism in this country. Don’t let’s make out to be more stupid than we are so as keep from hurting the feelings of the people who really are stupid. I’ve had just about enough of catering to and accommodating the lowest common denominator.
Buy a bunch of pocket-sized dictionaries and if someone questions your word choice in a tacky or insulting way, hand one of them over to him/her and say, “Look it up! Don’t be proud of being uneducated! It’s nothing to be proud of!”
Dseid briefly mentioned “code switching,” and it’s worth bringing up.
Everybody has multiple sets of vocabularies. Our written vocabularies are much larger than our spoken ones, to start. Beyond that, we tend to use different word banks with different sets of people. This is very normal, and is in fact expected in most social situations.
Code switching is not accommodating the lowest common denominator - it’s acknowledging that there are infinite varieties of social circumstance.
Put it this way - if the purpose of speaking is to be understood, why would we not endeavor to be understood fully? Eloquence is meaningless if nobody is capable of appreciating it, and some of my favorite authors achieve sublime eloquence with very simple vocabulary indeed.
[QUOTE=ThelmaLou;20578244
Back to my original reply of “so what?” I absolutely do not care if people think I’m showing off. And I’m not even a little bit susceptible to “social rebuke.” Maybe it’s because I’m old.
I suggest you be your smart, big-word self around anyone and everyone and let the devil take the hindmost. Don’t dumb yourself or your speech down because some people don’t understand your eggheady words. [/SIZE]
[/QUOTE]
ETA ^ In response to ThelmaLou:
No thanks. I’m doing fine with my language as it is. I like people understanding me and not having to stop and explain what I meant. I see no need to change. Just like I swear around certain people and don’t swear around other people, my vocabulary changes from person to person, depending on what I feel is appropriate. I rather enjoy the flexibility. But, as I said before, my default diction tends to be fairly vernacular, so it’s very natural to me. Just like certain people bring out different sides of my personality, they also bring out different parts of my vocabulary. Hell, even my accent changes depending on what group of people I’m around. If I’m around my neighborhood buddies, I revert back to my Chicago accent. In more neutral situations, I have a much more neutral accent and more careful enunciation, instead of lopping off my "th"s and slurring my "str"s into “shtr” sounds, which is my totally natural accent. Also, my totally natural language involves quite a bit of swearing, so that needs to be reigned in when I talk to most people.
