Page 111 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

49 UTILIZE LEXICAL
ECONOMY, ER, I MEAN
USE SHORT WORDS

I’ve just read an article about inaugural speeches given by
American presidents. The comment that leaped out at me was that
Abraham Lincoln, the best writer and deliverer of such speeches,
would never use a three-syllable or even a two-syllable word where a
one-syllable word would do.

Some years later, in 1946, George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Politics
and the English Language,” that scribes should not use a long word
where a short word will do. It’s instructive to compare the sentiments
of these two giants of the English language to those espoused by the
pygmies inhabiting many so-called communications departments.
Here we find a rule that Orwell might have described as, “Four
beats good, Two beats bad.”

The idea

From a couple of corporate websites
I came across a great example of corporate speak recently on the
website of a large consulting firm. They advertise proudly that, “Our
specialization is the provision of business solutions.” Whatever
that means. Another’s home page was so dense that it achieved a
Flesch Reading Ease score of zero. To put that into perspective, the
American Internal Revenue Code is easier to understand.

It’s fairly easy to imagine the process in the writer’s mind that leads
to this sort of sludge. “We’re an important firm with lots of extremely

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