Sometimes you have to use complicated terms because you’re dealing with complicated ideas…
Other times it’s clear that the authors are just trying to pad the length of a paper and sound more pompous.
In Brazil we call this “enchendo linguiça”, which literally translates to “filling sausage”.
Yeah, I get shit occasionally in random places for using bigger words when they actually would take multiple sentences to replace.
But there are a fucking lot of people who use big (or obscure) words purely as a kind of signaling that they’re smart, rather than for communication. And it’s usually really obvious to people who have better vocabularies (or better understanding of the jargon in a specific field) that they don’t know what they’re doing.
If after looking up a word, the rationale for the word choice doesn’t become understandable on at least some level, it’s probably nonsense. (There are some super smart people who just don’t know how to communicate though and think the word’s as simple to everyone else as to them.)
“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” - Mark Twain (attributed?)
Look at you, communicating with a purpose. I’m just trying to make my essay 1500 words
I was absolutely terrible at that. I had really bad homework grades and completion rates exactly because of shit like that.
“You gave me a 500 word question. I can’t make 1500 words out of it. If I’m going to fail anyways fuck turning it in.” (No, no part of that approach was intelligent, but I just couldn’t fill space with obvious trash. My brain would shut down.)
On the flip side of this, it makes me sad that using fancy words usually just makes you seem pretentious in normal conversations, which has made a lot of cool/interesting words unusable for me. Even words that used to be pretty common, like insipid, will have most people look at you like 🤨
I’ve seen a cool chart somewhere that pointed at specific words for varying intensities of specific adjectives. The objectif was to avoid writing very+adjective, which sounds boring, and use the proper word instead.
Portugal é encher chouriços
you’re dealing with complicated ideas
With many specific components or processes that must be differentiated between each other, and often the difference is negligible, abstract or hazy to the untrained eye.
You draw a schema or diagram then.
A major turning point in one’s academic journey is when you go from struggling to compose a lengthy and impressive essay to struggling to compose a concise and accessible essay (otherwise known as the “too-short-and-basic to too-long-and-pompous shift”). Sometimes this takes leaving academia and realizing that your masterpiece work doesn’t mean shit if no one bothered to read it.
I was an engineer is school. I’ve always been good at fluffing up my writing, but it always annoyed me that I had to make things longer when I felt like I was already done.
When one of my first engineering reports said “this has to be no more than 2 pages long” as opposed to “at least” I knew I had chosen the right school. Lol
Don’t forget 2 pages with pictures and tables.
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The more I see the nakedness of the emperor, the more impressed I am with the skill of the wizards who crafted his invisible clothes.
ChatGPT in a nutshell
Unfortunately the average person prefers flowery language for some reason. So that’s what OpenAI optimized for.
If you tell it to be precise and short it usually works fine.
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Love that In work we try to minimize the words as much as possible.
Key reasons come to mind:
- global audience and people need to put it into translator.
- some people we work with are dumb as doornails and ideas need to be simplified.
- no one wants to read 5 paragraph for a simple we don’t know what color you wanted.
- ain’t nobody got time for that.
Those extend the paper as long as possible skills are useless in the real-world.
What about job applications?
Those skills are used when filling out forms that are going to be AI processed and need to have all the keywords from the job ad jammed into each answer.
I wouldn’t know wtf HR doing. Those are the same POS that demand 15 years experience for something that came out 2 years ago.
I scared future is putting tiny tags in background to look like a elegant pattern so AI reads it but person just sees the good stuff. even still it’s min max words. Can’t fit the whole dictionary on one page.
Those extend the paper as long as possible skills are useless in the real-world.
CEOs, politicians and business people disagree.
I mean, they are useless in the big picture.
It’s funny cause boss is always trying to hide information to business people. They tend to get overwhelmed if we don’t.
I expected him to aspire to become a politician until the last frame
