Chris Brogan v Makurrah on the blogger's vocabulary

This a.m. my inbox yielded another post from the prolific Chris Brogan:  "Write Better Blog Posts Today."  The "today" was an effective hook - of course I want to start writing better posts today, right away, now - so I read with attention, finding myself admiring once again Chris' willingness to share the benefit of his experience.  He offers a good deal of solid advice, succinctly put, and I would recommend the post to novice as well as more experienced bloggers.  Read it at http://www.chrisbrogan.com/write-better-blog-posts-today/

But I had to disagree on one point, which I reproduce below:

A caution about choice of words: a great piece of advice a professor once gave me was this: “tell it to me like I’m 6 years old.” Ken Hadge said that’s what he told anyone trying to sell him something the moment they used a large word. The other day, I spoke in front of a huge international audience. I used the smallest words I had, except for one: serendipity. I had never considered how hard to translate that word might be to other cultures. The definition of serendipity is: the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. I could’ve found another way to say it, or could have bolstered up the original use of the word with a simple definition. Because I missed this, I lost some small part of my audience.

Words matter. Choose yours for an inclusive audience. Everyone knows you’re smart already. Save the big words for your crossword puzzles.

For the moment, I will simply append here the comment I left for Chris earlier today:

This is a great post, Chris - lots of wit and wisdom. I disagree, however, on one thing - I think that the professor who gave the advice about addressing him like he's a 6-year old misses something important. One thing a dedicated blogger can give his/her readers is language, including words they might not know, but might want to know. Your example of serendipity is a great one: use the word, gloss it in another clause - you're giving the gift of new words that others can turn around and regift. It doesn't have to be an either-or: go ahead and use more complicated or sophisticated language (which may in fact be required to make your point precisely), but provide the meaning or sense as well. Surely we're not under pressure to leave out the better part of our vocabulary to reach an audience.

I haven't heard back yet, but I know from my Twitter feed that Chris is in transit and will be offline all day.  But there is more to be said about the language of blogging in what some are calling a new era of literacy.  I'll return to this in tomorrow's post.

Comments

[Deborah]

Hey Chris, thanks for firing one back. There's no doubt that you are superb at what you do, and like others I am grateful for the generosity you show in sharing your experience. Using small words to tell big stories obviously makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. Using all kinds of words to tell all kinds of stories also works, over time, no?
I always take something of value away from your writing, so consider me indebted.

[Chris Brogan...]

Interesting. I don't consider myself in the vocabulary business. Instead, I like using small words to tell big stories. Does that make sense? I say things like "give your ideas handles," which is a way of talking about conferring idea value down distribution paths. I prefer "idea handles" to the more academic language.

But, one's mileage may vary. Thanks for your points.