Hello everyone, how’s everything going? Today’s piece is a little different, because I’m asking you to actually just pause and wake up for a bit. 

Ready? 

Please learn how to write. 

I am saying this right now not because you don’t know how to put words down on paper. In fact, even as we speak, some of you are probably thinking to write out an angry text or maybe even a comment down below about how this is a silly post because you already know how to write. It’s very simple. How could you even think that this is a problem? Well, as a matter of fact, it is. 

When I say “please learn how to write,” I don’t mean that you put together one or two or three sentences. I mean, please learn how to use words to create a well-constructed piece of work that persuades me that you are able to sustain a line of inquiry, discussion, argument, or description while understanding how to create whatever effect it is that you want. And when I say this, I don’t mean learn how to prompt. Learn how to question, learn how to craft prompts that’s important too. But there is something far more important I want you to learn: how to use your brain to manually put words together and understand how to craft not only sentences but also supporting points, elaborations, and explanations. And I want you to be able to do it consistently and well. 

Now I’m saying this partly because of what’s been on everyone’s minds: AI. There’s a good chance that before you were reading this piece, you were using ChatGPT. You were writing beautiful questions one after another, entertaining your curiosity and then contemplating what you would ask about next. Some of you might have even been making people think that you are secretly geniuses as you pull out assignment after assignment from the bowels of the earth, perfectly formatted, written, constructed, created. 

I’m here to tell you that’s wonderful. But I’m also here to ask you: Are you really learning how to write? 

Is your brain discovering what patterns of words work well together? 

Are you deepening your understanding of what words to place next to each other? 

Do you know what will accomplish the goal of what you’re trying to do, and what will reach inside the mind of the person that you’re speaking to, whether on the page, in real life, or in any other situation where you’re crafting language from letters and bringing together ideas from the words that they form? 

If the answer is no even when you shut your eyes and try to imagine the words that should come to mind when you think about the richness of our universe, seriously, we have a serious problem here. 

When you have started to reach a satisfactory state, this is what I imagine that you will see. 

The right words will appear in your own mind organically and at the right time, and your brain should have a process to bring your words forward one after another into the construction of logical meaning. 

In time, even if the correct words aren’t there, you’ll be able to understand why they are in the wrong place and rearrange patterns that are more accurate to the vision that you wish to accomplish. 

That is the foundation of accurate, articulate, and precise writing—something that arises organically from you without a need for aid, assistance, or help in any form. 

Before we end, here’s an important thing to clarify. I am not saying that you should not use ChatGPT. 

I am not saying that we should deny AI, rail against technology, fight against the machine, and set to fire a million Midjourney and ChatGPT images while asking the very same ChatGPT how to use a sledgehammer to destroy an NVIDIA H100 after having learned that these are the computers that power our modern technological generative architecture.

Rather what I am saying is that when we use technology, it is ideally to enhance our innate human capabilities, allowing us to develop skills that we otherwise may never have developed. 

Of course, as this technology advances, I am sure that there will be many people who will discover that it will allow for people to create things that they had never imagined, and it is in the sweet consequence of the apparently polished essay that the AI detector could not distinguish that they will measure and validate the worth of what they were able to create for themselves. 

In time, as technology progresses, they may not distinguish between any works generated with AI and what the human mind was able to construct. 

Given the way that technology operates, perhaps it is a far-off dream to assume that somehow our technology would just mysteriously fade away, disappear, be eclipsed into darkest night. 

But all I can say is given what humans have been and are able to develop themselves to be, I think that it is a manifest shame to let our abilities crinkle to the wayside merely because we thought that there was no space or role for the supercomputer inside our heads. 

Hello everyone!

Those of you out there on premium memberships, here’s a small update just for you!

Your descriptive and narrative composition banks have been updated to October-November 2024.

Enjoy, and I hope that you’ll enjoy the examples. If you don’t already have a premium membership, you can go right ahead and get one over here and get access to all of our resources.

To supercharge your FLE success, don’t wait and sign up today!

Yours,
Victor.

We all know the person—and maybe you are him, her, or any permutation of individuals—who is guilty of this unfortunate yet understandable sin:

Jargon. 

Here is an example of that sin.

“After the mellifluous exultance of the 24-hour cycle, their soporific condition led them to a state of imperturbable somnolence.”

Compare that to… “After their happy day had come to an end, they were so sleepy that they went to bed and would not wake even for World War III.”

Should we let you see a few more examples?

Well, here are more.

1. Academic Jargon vs Clarity

Jargon:

“The protagonist engaged in repeated cognitive recalibrations in response to persistent epistemological dissonance.”

Simple:

“He kept changing his mind because nothing made sense to him.” 

2. Legalistic or Bureaucratic Language

Jargon:

“Pursuant to the aforementioned provisions, the tenant was compelled to initiate spatial realignment.”

Simple:

“The tenant had to move out.” 

3. Philosophy Overload

Jargon:

“Her moral compass vacillated under the duress of ontological ambiguity and normative flux.”

Simple:

“She didn’t know what the right thing to do was.” 

4. Over-technical Scientific Style

Jargon:

“Upon exposure to photonic excitation, the chlorophyll-rich entity initiated autotrophic biochemical synthesis.”

Simple:

“The plant started making food when the sun came out.” 

5. Pretentious Literary Style

Jargon:

“As the vesperal hour descended, the celestial canvas darkened in chromatic gradation, eliciting ruminative melancholia.”

Simple:

“As evening came, the sky got darker, and he started to feel sad.” 

6. Economic Nonsense

Jargon:

“Aggregate demand fluctuations instigated a stochastic reallocation of capital in low-growth markets.”

Simple:

“People stopped spending, so money moved away from slow businesses.” 

Why is this a sin?

Because it makes your writing difficult to understand with very little benefit.

Just think about it — every single one of the jargon sentences could have been simplified and made easy to understand for the vast majority of people with no loss in meaning.

Now, if you’re new to writing—or perhaps you were told over and over again by your teachers that a good sentence has so-called high-quality words, and if you stuff your sentences with them you will end up with good quality writing—you might actually think that these sentences are good sentences. 

“This is what English is about,” you may declare, while writing essays filled with flowery words that a teacher, a parent, or a dictionary company told you were valuable and that would somehow turn your ordinary sentences into works of art.

Regrettably, though, that is not what it’s about.

That’s why we are here today:

To stage an intervention. 

No, your Thesaurus words do not make you look smart, and the people who are facilitating you and telling you that they do are part of the problem.

Jargon does not make you look impressive. Instead, it makes you look low status.

Well—I should caveat that.

Maybe you were really explaining something that required the words that you were using.

Perhaps somehow they were precisely chosen, and without them there would have been no possibility that you could have ever articulated the exact meaning of what was necessary.

These mere mortals should feel joyful and enlightened as a consequence of your arduous dictionary search through page after page in order to convey your grand vision unto them!!!

Well, here’s news for you: if you’re reading this, you’re probably not writing research papers. If you were, then you’d be out winning your next Nobel Prize—not being swayed by somebody who is telling you about how people write like rubbish. 

Oh, and guess what? There’s even more news for you! If you have to write every single sentence with jargon, arcane phrasings, and attempts to make people think that you are so-called smart, you are engaging in what linguistics scholars call linguistic overcompensation — A phenomenon that has been researched to the point that we now know that low-status individuals use infinitely more jargon compared to high-status individuals.

As we can see from this study of the linguistic usage of graduate students of lower-ranked universities, compared to those from higher-ranked universities, the research shows that the lower the rank of the university from which the graduate student was surveyed, the more jargon they tended to use.

On the other hand, students from higher-ranked universities tended to write more clearly, with precision, with the intention of making their meaning simple, clear—not difficult to understand. 

Now you might think to yourself that you’re not a graduate student.

Well, many of you reading this one day will be—and perhaps by then you will remember what I said, assuming, of course, you don’t internalize it completely here and now, where you sit or stand reading every single word. 

I’m happy to inform you that every word is relevant for you at the moment as well regardless of your stage in life.

I don’t care if you are a king, a prime minister, a politician, an academic, a high schooler, or a kindergartner.

When you write, please don’t use jargon unless you have no alternatives, and think hard and carefully before you even consider using it.

Please don’t try to act like you are a world-shaking genius and therefore pretend to do what you think world-shaking geniuses do, because while you don’t realise it at the moment, there’s a very clear, sharp, and unmistakable distinction between what you think the geniuses of our era do and what you are actually doing. 

Every single thesaurus-reference word that you breathe out of your mouth or write in an essay adds to complexity—and also to the probability of your mistakes. Many, after all, are the people who write but don’t really understand what they are saying because they want to use hard words after hard words with no regard for what they are actually saying.

Look closely at what people who write like this are trying to communicate, and I can guarantee you that 99 times out of 100, you will not understand their meaning—and the message will not have come across. 

My writing advice for you is this: do not be like that.

Focus on the meaning of what you are trying to communicate. Ask yourself how you can most efficiently deliver that meaning with the words that you have. And ask yourself whether you can simplify what is being said—choosing fewer words, choosing only those that showcase the logic.

If it seems like you are “dumbing down” what you are writing, you are entirely entitled to feel that way.

After all, the more simple words you use, the more “kindergarten-ish” you must surely be speaking? Correct?

To that I say: Nice try, but the answer is no.

What you think is valuable need not match up with your intuitions of what you think is valuable to the audience, and according to my experience of coaching students and having them score A*s and 9.0s for writing in the IELTS, your intuition in this case does not match up with reality.

Of course, you need not trust my experience if you prefer not to — there is after all no guarantee that what was said here today provides an accurate description of truth or how the world works. So you will have to evaluate that as well. But I submit this to you: to think about clear, simple, and easy-to-understand language is a rarity in our modern world. But it is also a gift to humanity.

Because at the end of the day, we want our writing to reach the greatest number of people that it can—so that the largest number of people possible can understand and take action in relation to what we say and what we do not say. 

If it makes you feel better—or appeals more strongly to your sense of fairness—doing this well is far from trivial.

Rather, it is a difficult task because simplicity does not come from the mere casting down of words onto paper. It is something that must be thought about, arranged, articulated, and engineered with precision—word by word—in terms of how every single contribution opens up the mind to images, ideas, and to logic and argumentation.

If you felt that this was valuable, make sure to share this, and to put it into practice in your own writing. I look forward to seeing you in the next ones ahead!