Cut the Crap!

by
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We all write loads of crap. All of us. Every day. It's time to stop. Think it through and cut it out.

I'm not so much talking about what we say but more the way we say it. We use stupidly over-complicated, flowery, pompous language to express very simple ideas. We should all just keep it clear and simple. The Campaign for Plain English has loads of great examples of ways we can replace the fancy words with simple ones. A few examples:

  • adjacent next to
  • amendment change
  • comprises includes
  • demonstrate show
  • discontinue stop
Removing the pretentious vocabulary also makes our writing much easier to understand for people who don't have English as their first language. It's all positive with no negatives.

Let's just keep it simple and cut the crap.