No Big Words Please!

Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you that I'm an advocate of simplicity. I like the stuff I read to be easy to understand and the things I look at to be easy on the eyes. In other words I despise the overuse of big words and I hate e-learning screens that are a cluttered busy mess. In this post we will focus our attention on the use of big words in elearning, and save the cluttered screen topic for a future post.

Now I happen to work for Corporate America, who in my humble opinion is enemy #1 when it comes to using big words, so I'm constantly saturated with this written vomit. Check out this example which was pulled from an actual corporate email sent to employees.

"As we execute on our 2010 key deliverables, current stakeholder analysis reveals that opportunity exists in the realm of key performance indicators. Company Core Values are cornerstone to executing on our competencies and methodologies, with a focus on business acumen and key company deliverables".

Reading something like this makes me want to (for a lack of a better word) puke! And that's putting it nicely. Why people insist on writing like this will stump me until the day I die! Did they get a new dictionary or thesaurus and thought it appropriate to load their writing with as many big impressive words as possible? Is the 'big word' fairy holding their family hostage demanding they use these words or else? I just don't get it.

I implore you as a developer NOT to write like this, and I used bold caps on NOT with great purpose and intent. Nothing will turn off your viewer quicker than verbosity (or big words). Don't want to take my word for it? Consider the following from perhaps more credible sources:

• "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." ~ Leonardo DaVinci
• "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." ~ Confucius
• "Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” ~ Albert Einstein

Let's backtrack now and explore how we might better write that monstrosity of paragraph we looked at earlier. Here's my attempt at it:

"Becoming more familiar with our overall business and continuing to follow the policies and practices we have in place will help us meet our 2010 goals".

Notice the exclusion of all the big unnecessary words. All of the following were left out: execute, key deliverables, stakeholder analysis, key performance indicators, competencies, methodologies, business acumen, etc.

In closing, those big fancy words may impress at the staff meeting, but they won't in an e-Learning course. Consider writing your courses so a 6th or 7th grader can read it (That's an 11 or 12 year old). Make your course an 'easy-read' and don't force your reader to pull out a dictionary to figure out what you're saying. Your anal retentive, corporate big-word using SME might not appreciate it, but your audience sure will.