Word choice

Writers who are college-educated often forget that words common to their vocab­ulary are not readily understood by large segments of the general public.

If your target audience is the general public, remember that a short Anglo-Saxon word is more understandable than a longer one derived from French, Greek, or Latin. The words on the left are better than the words on the right:

buy purchase

home residence

hire employ

try endeavor

total aggregate

improve ameliorate

building edifice

duty, task responsibility

gather, collect accumulate

save economize

enough sufficient

test experiment

able efficient

More complex words, of course, can be used if the target audience is well educated. Most readers of the Wall Street Journal, for example, are college graduates, so the writing is more complex than that found in a small-town daily.

Also, if the target audience is professionals in a field such as law, education, sci­ence, or engineering, the standard for word choice is different. Educators, for example, often seem to like elaborate expressions.

Scientific writing, too, is loaded with esoteric words. Newspaper editors often com­plain that they receive news releases from high-technology companies that are so full of jargon that neither they nor their readers can grasp what is being said.

If your audience is engineers, of course, you can use specialized words and phrases.