Keep it short, stupid

Lawyers love big words. So do people who fancy themselves lawyers (pseudolawyers — you know who you are). But better writing uses shorter words. Churchill — who knew a thing or two about words — famously said, "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all." It's not a coincidence that the most common words in English usage are also among the shortest. And the oldest.

The folks at the Oxford Dictionaries have created the Oxford English Corpus to keep track of words in actual usage. The number of words tracked in the corpus is now over one billion (not one billion different words; just one billion words tracked). Using the corpus, the lexicographers can tell how common different words are. The ten most popular are: the (50 million hits), be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I. These ten words make up a quarter of all the words used in the corpus.

Of the top 100 words, only three have two syllables: about (45), person (61), and because (94). And most of the top 100 words are from Old English.

Lawyers, on the other hand, tend to use too many multisyllabic Latin-derived words. Terminate instead of fire. Conclusion instead of end. Demonstrate insead of show. But if you want readers to better understand you, use shorter, clearer, more common words.