Monday, November 5, 2007

Dengl 8 Hem Ing Way beats Roth?

I think the following came from one of the many places in which psychology writer Christian Jarrett tells members of the British Psychological Society about recent studies ... I have a point to add ...

he begins:

The write advice, put simply

EVIDENCE adduced by psychological researcher Daniel M. Oppenheimer of Princeton University in New Jersey suggests that utilisation of unnecessarily elongated verbal expressions could have the consequence of their writer being perceived as less intelligent by readers.
Oppenheimer asked undergraduates to look at university application letters, half of which he had manipulated by replacing every noun, verb and adjective with its longest synonym from the Microsoft Word 2000 thesaurus (retaining linguistic sense and grammatical structure). Students who saw the modified letters were less likely to say that they would have admitted the author to university than were the students who saw an unaltered application letter.
Oppenheimer also presented a second set of undergraduate volunteers with student dissertation abstracts, half of which he had altered by replacing every word of nine or more letters with its second shortest synonym from the Microsoft Word 2000 thesaurus. Here, students judged the authors of the simplified passages to be more clever than the authors of the unaltered passages.
These effects also extended to an author’s font selection. For example, participants viewed the authors of text written in italicised Juice font to be of lower intelligence than did participants who saw identical wording written in Times New Roman.
Oppenheimer commented: ‘The continuing popularity amongst students of using big words and attractive font styles may be due* to the fact that they may not realise these techniques could backfire.’ He suggested: ‘One thing seems certain: write as simply as possible and it’s more likely you’ll be thought of as intelligent.’
The findings will be published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology**.

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one of the very first articles I ever had published (in the Architects' Journal, back in the '60s!) suggested that the American Forces (according to what we were invited to believe, in the war movies of the time) were making a mistake in having their servicemen (yes, I can say that, there seemed to have ben no active servicewomen then - and if they had been there they may not have been so silly) used to shout out "neg ative; neg ative" - or "affirm ative"
what, I asked, if commotion or interference lost the first syllable or two?
all that the receiver would hear would be - ative'

why not have their service people repeat the essential syllable - if they have the luxury of three to go over the air and say
NO NO NO or YES YES YES ?

I think the answer is that this makes the speaker sound like a person; the aggravated latin makes the speaker sound more like a (non-killing) robot
however, for accurate comprehension the personal seems likely to be better

so, not only would one be judged more clever for speaking simply - one WOULD BE more clever for doing so!

*"Students still like using long words and fancy fonts, though these may not be the best ways" ....
** er - would "Useful Psychology" do? Isn't "cognitive" woven into the meaning of the "psych -" syllable? (an argument I urged on the B PS - as we see, unsuccessfully, when they institutionalised the term "cognitive psychology"

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