A small consultancy is preparing its biggest proposal of the year. The first draft says, simply, that they’ll help the client cut delivery delays by reorganising how orders move through the warehouse. It feels too plain. So the team gets to work.
By the final version, the same idea reads: “Leveraging our holistic, data-driven methodology, we will optimise end-to-end operational throughput to unlock sustainable efficiency gains across the fulfilment value chain.” Everyone agrees it sounds more professional. Nobody is quite sure it says anything more.
This instinct is almost universal. We worry that simple language will make us look simple, so we reach for longer words and more abstract phrases, hoping they’ll signal intelligence, seriousness or value. It’s a reasonable worry. It’s also, according to a surprising body of research, mostly wrong.
Plain language isn’t about writing for children or stripping out nuance. It’s about removing everything that gets between your reader and your meaning. And it turns out that readers notice, and reward, the effort.
One Like insight: Complicated language doesn’t make you sound clever. It makes your reader work harder to find out whether you are.
Big words, smaller impression
In 2006, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, then at Princeton, published a paper with a deliberately ridiculous title: “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.” The joke was the point.
He began with an awkward observation. Most writing guides advise clarity and simplicity, yet a majority of the university students he surveyed admitted to deliberately making their vocabulary more complex to seem intelligent. So he tested whether it worked. Across a series of experiments, he took real pieces of writing, including graduate school application essays, and created versions with progressively more complex vocabulary, in some cases by swapping words for the longest synonyms a thesaurus offered. Readers then judged the authors.
The result was consistent: the more complex the writing, the less intelligent readers judged the author to be. This held regardless of how good the original essay was. In another experiment, simply printing a text in a harder-to-read font lowered readers’ opinions of its author. Oppenheimer’s conclusion was that needless complexity leads to negative evaluations, and his advice to writers was disarmingly simple: “write clearly and simply if you can.”
Note the important word “needlessly”. Oppenheimer wasn’t arguing against technical terms where they’re necessary. A surgeon’s notes for another surgeon should use medical language. The problem is complexity that adds effort without adding meaning.
Highlight: Readers don’t judge your intelligence by your vocabulary. They judge it by how easily they understand you.
Why easy feels true
Oppenheimer’s explanation centres on something psychologists call processing fluency: how easy it feels to take in a piece of information. When something is easy to read, hear or understand, people tend to feel more positive about it, and often more confident that it’s true. When something is hard work, that effort leaves a faint negative impression, and people often attribute it to the source rather than to the words.
One Like readers may recognise the idea. In Everyone’s Looking for Value, we looked at research by Oppenheimer and Adam Alter showing that companies with easy-to-pronounce names performed better shortly after their stock market debut. And in Nobody Reads Your Website. They Scan It., we saw Nielsen and Morkes find that promotional language slowed readers down because they had to filter out the hype to get to the facts. Fluency keeps turning up because it reflects something basic about how our minds work: we treat effort as a signal.
For a business, that signal matters most at moments of uncertainty: reading a quote, comparing proposals, deciding whether to trust a new supplier. If your explanation is easy to follow, the customer’s brain quietly registers that you know what you’re doing. If it’s a slog, the same brain quietly wonders what you’re hiding.
[Infographic placement] The fluency effect. A simple two-path diagram starting from the same message. Upper path: Easy to read → feels clear → feels credible → “These people know what they’re doing.” Lower path: Hard to read → takes effort → feels uncertain → “What are they hiding?” Caption: Oppenheimer found that needless complexity lowered readers’ opinions of the author, regardless of the quality of the ideas.
Highlight: When your words are hard work, customers don’t blame the words. They blame you.
What plain language is (and isn’t)
Plain language is sometimes mistaken for dumbing down. It’s closer to the opposite. Writing simply about something complicated requires you to understand it well enough to know what matters, and to make choices about what to leave out. Vague, inflated language is often easier to write precisely because it avoids those decisions.
In practice, plain language comes down to a few habits:
- Use the everyday word. “Use” rather than “leverage”, “help” rather than “facilitate”, “start” rather than “commence”.
- Prefer the concrete to the abstract. “We’ll cut your delivery times from five days to three” beats “we’ll optimise your fulfilment throughput”.
- Name who does what. “We’ll send your invoice on the first of the month” is clearer than “Invoices will be issued monthly.”
- Keep sentences short, but not robotic. Vary the rhythm, but give each sentence one main job.
- Keep technical terms where they’re needed, and explain them once. Precision matters; mystery doesn’t.
None of this removes personality. Some of the most distinctive brand voices are also the plainest. Plain language simply means your personality shows up in what you say, rather than in how hard you make people work to understand it.
Highlight: Writing simply about something complex isn’t dumbing down. It’s proof you understand it.
What this means for a small business
Take one important piece of writing, perhaps your home page, a proposal template or your standard terms, and read it aloud. Anywhere you’d feel faintly embarrassed saying the words to a customer’s face is a good place to start editing. Underline every word you wouldn’t use in conversation and ask what it actually means. Then write that instead.
It also helps to agree, as a team, that plain language is a professional standard rather than a lack of polish. Many people inflate their writing because they fear plain words will look amateur. Hearing that customers and colleagues prefer clarity gives them permission to write the way they’d speak.
A few questions can help:
- Which words in our proposals would we never say out loud to a customer?
- Where are we using abstract phrases to avoid committing to something specific?
- Could a customer explain our offer to a friend after reading it once?
- Are we keeping technical terms because they’re needed, or because they make us feel expert?
Which brings us back to the consultancy and its throughput-optimising, value-chain-unlocking proposal. The first draft, the one that felt too plain, said exactly what they’d do and what the client would gain. It was the more impressive version all along. It just didn’t sound like it to the people who wrote it.
Sources
- Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly”, Applied Cognitive Psychology 20(2), 2006. Quoted via Peter K. Dunn, Scientific Research and Methodology, section 37.2. Experimental details checked against several secondary summaries.
