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The noted historian, Barbara Tuchman, wrote in the Saturday Review in December 1966, “Let us beware of the plight of our colleagues, the behavioral scientists, who by use of a proliferating jargon have painted themselves into a corner—or isolation ward—of unintelligibility. They know what they mean, but no one else does. Psychologists and sociologists are farthest gone in the disease and probably incurable. Their condition might be pitied if one did not suspect it was deliberate. Their retreat into the arcane is meant to set them apart from the great unlearned, to mark their possession of some unshared, unsharable expertise.” Discussions of things such as spirituality often feature long words and difficult-to-grasp arguments. In contrast to those behavioral scientists described by Ms. Tuchman, I do not possess any unshared or unsharable expertise, and I hope to avoid the pitfall of unintelligibility. I have been impressed by the effectiveness of the AA teaching to “keep it simple”…
But what is justice? Is it just that some people suffer poverty without an opportunity to extricate themselves while others are born to luxury and excess? Is it just to allow people to be homeless if there is a way of providing shelter for them? Is it just to be cruel or abusive to others, or to allow such practices to continue when we could take remedial action? Ensuring justice is not the sole prerogative of the legal system, but the responsibility of everyone. Hence, we must be aroused to do whatever is within our means to bring about true justice and by so doing ennoble ourselves as caring, spiritual human beings.
A spiritual life should be an enjoyable one. As one veteran of AA said, “If you are not enjoying sobriety, you are doing it wrong.”
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Keep it simple, stupid! by Jonathan Wood
Using longer words to appear more intelligent actually has the opposite effect – a lesson for all of us.
“Eschew obfuscation,” said the failing English teacher, explaining to his class how to write better essays. It’s an old joke, and not a very good one at that, because most of us need to look up a dictionary before we get it.
I was reminded of this story when I came across a paper by Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University that had this great title: ‘Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly’ [Appl. Cognitive Psych. (2006) 20, 139]. Oppenheimer reports how he altered a series of excerpts, translations, and student essays by changing the complexity of random words. He then asked Stanford students about how easy they found the texts to read and to rate the author’s intelligence. Perhaps surprisingly, the more complex the words used, the less intelligent an author appears to the reader.
We all know that we should write simply and clearly, but a lot of us might secretly admit to adding in the odd, extra-impressive word in the past to show that we know our stuff. If not, I’m sure we’ve all read students’ work or some papers where this has been taken to a painful extreme. Apparently, this practice is detrimental to the reader’s opinion of the work, regardless of prior expectations of the text’s quality.
“The paper investigates the effect of reducing fluency – the feeling of ease or difficulty associated with a mental task – on judgments of intelligence,” explains Oppenheimer. “Reducing fluency hurts readers’ inferences about the text’s author. In practice, this suggests that writers should attempt to express themselves as clearly as possible.”
Complex and specialized vocabulary is often a necessity in research where there is need for precision and accuracy. However, we need to recognize that this creates an exclusive club of those who can follow the language (and is also why some try to to become a member by overusing complicated terms). Care is needed, especially in interdisciplinary areas, that unnecessary jargon doesn’t become a barrier to entry for those outside the immediate specialty. I know from personal experience how language can be the biggest challenge in grasping the world of molecular biology, for example.
We try our best to make Materials Today accessible and easy to read, but no doubt we could do more. In his paper, Oppenheimer quotes studies that have found that fluency and simpler writing can lead to higher judgements of the text’s truth, greater confidence in what is said, and even liking of the author. So it’s clearly something to strive for!
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