Those who've seen me write (which, I suppose, now includes all of you) know that I often oscillate without warning from a highly academic syllable selection and the self-important stylings of archaic narration to the brisk, refreshing feeling of simple words and simple structures.
That is not an accident.
It's an illusion that big words make for better writing. There's an incredible amount of impact hiding between the scant letters of simple words. The notion of accessibility (making sure you're understood by a wider audience) is only a fringe benefit; the real power of simple words and simple sentence structure is the sense of hard, fixed immediacy that we naturally associate with such speech.
This stretches back onto the discussion of voice: in text, no one can hear you speak. Shaping a scene or the tone of your words involves entirely different tricks in English than the typical tonal variance we're used to with verbal communication. Sarcasm is one of the clearest examples of just how different and difficult text can make the act of meaning-conveyance.
The fuller discussion of voice covers an entire discipline, but in one of its less-visited corners lives the discussion over "what reading level am I aiming for?"
It's fairly common knowledge that journalists aim for lower reading levels (3rd to 5th grade, typically). A journalist is interested in maximum accessibility. They want anyone walking past a newspaper stand to be able to understand the letters in large, bold print across the top of the page.
Another reason is space: headlines can only use so many words, and the thought of multiple clauses is right out. Much like Twitter, the medium forces a journalist to pare down what they might want to write into short, simple words and phrases.
But there is a third reason: a headline is meant to have maximum impact. Consider the sentence "Dewey defeats Truman;" grammatically, a complete sentence, but arguably as threadbare as they come. Yet it makes a spectacular (if inaccurate) headline. Three words: subject, verb, object. We know in an instant the outcome of the future of the American world, and there isn't even an adjective at play.
That is the power of simplicity.
Simplicity has a naturally higher impact. The quickness of it, the frankness of it hits our minds with greater force, like the dense, compacted core of an exploded star. In a sentence of five words, every word gains a greater significance. Each word gains a stress, and that leads to greater emotional effect as they stamp themselves one by one into the reader's memory.
It's a natural habit of the mind to iambicize most human speech. We alternate stressed and unstressed words the same way we do syllables unless something deliberately interrupts the flow.
Try saying aloud: "I went to town today," and listen to where the down-beats fall. "i WENT to TOWN toDAY." Likewise: "I hardly think it's time to talk of death" may sound more like "i HARDly THINK it's TIME to TALK of DEATH."
Those stresses are key, because in a larger sentence, they naturally start to fade. We crave completion, so any long sentence gets largely passed over while we digest at a high level the whole of its meaning. Only then do we re-read it to appreciate the scenic beauty of its flow.
The more complex the sentence, the more obscure the words chosen, the greater the chance for skimming. We start to see clauses as syllables unto themselves, "zooming out" the stressed/unstressed pattern until entire phrases and sentences might fall in the "unstressed" pile. Yet even long sentences can keep a reader's attention on first pass if they make sure not to interrupt their own flow.
Consider the following:
"The town was desolate: a broken husk of a once-great beast laid bare to rot in the fading sun, its inhabitants little more than scavenger insects scrambling across the blanch-white bones of a forgotten corpse, searching in vain for the scraps that might keep them from turning into corpses themselves."
Four clauses and a tiny bit of run-on at the end, but from a literary perspective, perfectly valid. Count the number of words in the above sentence that strike you as "high level" or difficult to understand. There is all manner of temptation to use them; to extend the sense of poetry on this grisly metaphor and torque it into something wholly unpalatable, but clearly, they're unnecessary to convey the imagery you intended.
Still, the sheer length of the description causes the mind to wander out of focus, to skim several words together and bundle them into an overall image. Not a bad thing in the sense of accessibility and meaning-conveyance, but it doesn't have a high impact, just a slow and ambient sense of dread or reverence for this ghost-like town.
Consider instead the first four words of the entire thing: "The town was desolate." Everything that follows is little more than one conjoined adjective for those four words. We know instantly, right from the start, the state of this town. The phrase has all the information and impact of the entire paragraph in four short words.
To further the emphasis, we might change "desolate" to "dead," further extending the metaphor to follow. Think about the stresses on that phrase: "the TOWN is DEAD." Two words: "Town." "Dead." There is your entire sentence broken down into eight little letters that will stick in a reader's mind whenever the town comes up.
With all this emphasis on concise, immediate speech, I want to take a moment to stress that this is not a better-than debate: long, florid prose is by no means invalid or less valuable. There is no shortage of evidence for this in nearly any book you pick up off nearly any shelf. I stress short, clear structure today because it is too often undervalued or written off as "childish."
If you consider simple words "childish" or easy to do, I recommend you try your hand at fitting an entire plot into six of them and see if you get anything even remotely as powerful as:
"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."
The power of simplicity is that it shifts the tone of voice on the written page. It breaks up the pattern and flow to wake up the mind and disrupt its natural routine for rote analysis, like tapping on the brakes while speeding down the highway to jar yourself awake as you make the long drive home late at night.
Interspersing a single short phrase (in which every word gains its own stress purely by constituting a larger percentage of the sentence as a whole) immediately before or after a lengthy, poetic description or dialog is thus that much more powerful because of the tonal difference from the words and phrasings around it.
Consider the first two paragraphs of this very post: one a long, ambling sentence with no shortage of complex words whose muddled syllables make for an even, diffuse stress across the entire paragraph, and one short, immediate phrase on a line all its own, glaring at the reader through all the empty white space around it and daring anyone to challenge its place on the page. In short:
Don't discount simplicity.
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