Page 86 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

Anathema Bellicosity Blabbing Blokeish Cash Dodgy
Embellished Empathetic Fizzy Grumpy Heavies
Hindrance Insinuate Misconstruing Nuanced
Razzle-dazzle Redoubtable Regurgitating Sizzling
Whopping.

I printed them on a worksheet and asked my delegates to split them
between those they reckoned came from The Economist and those
they thought came from The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper. It
worked beautifully. All the delegates divided the 20 words neatly into
two lists of ten. See if you can figure out which way they jumped.

Once I’d had my fun with the “ta daa!” moment, we discussed what
The Economist was up to, mixing it up like this. (The ability and
confidence to use a mixture of registers in the same piece of writing
is a characteristic of good literary stylists, according to James Wood,
a staff writer at the New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of
Literary Criticism at Harvard.)

One of the conclusions was that truly intelligent people have no
need to show off by using flashy language. Where a longer word is
the only word that will do, then fine, the writer will use it and use it
boldly. But true authority, the state of knowing a lot about the subject
you’re writing about, can just as easily be conveyed through a more
muscular, Plain English style.

In practice

• Call a spade a spade, not a cavity construction apparatus.
• If you find you’ve used a word of three syllables or more, stop

for a moment and ask whether there’s a one- or two-syllable
alternative that means the same.

100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS • 77