Daniel M. Oppenheimer

Very often, they use fewer, simpler ones.

In two thousand six, a psychologist named Daniel Oppenheimer put the most popular strategy for sounding smart to the test.

He had found that most of the students he surveyed admitted to deliberately making their vocabulary more complicated so they would seem more intelligent.

So he ran the experiment.

That's the same assumption that Sokal exploited in his experiment, and what's funny about that is that doing that can sometimes have the opposite effect.

Daniel Oppenheimer conducted a series of experiments where readers evaluated different pieces of writing.

Some versions of this writing used unnecessarily long and complex language.

But other versions had the exact same ideas, only they were written more plainly using more basic vocabulary.

Now, this idea of transformation, it might help explain why some research has found that writing notes out by hand is better than typing notes on a computer.

There's a famous study, uh, from 2014 by Mueller and Oppenheimer.

Uh, again, I'll leave a link down below.

In this study, students watched lectures and took notes either by laptop or by hand, and what they found is that students remembered and understood better when they took handwritten notes as opposed to typing.

Hmm

... by the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer.

Oh, this is a brilliant study.

It's so clever.

And, and, and far too many people have this assumption that complex is good, that they will impress the audience, uh, into behavior change if they write in a complex way.

But people like Daniel Oppenheimer, people like Todd Rogers, they show again and again, simple language is often much more effective.

Complex language confuses people, and that irritates the, the reader.

So keep it simple.