I caught myself using a really long, fancy word the other day when a short “normal” word would have worked. “OMG, what has gotten into me?” I thought. When did long words become the norm?

So, I am working on using plain language for a while. Maybe not for all time, but at least for now. It may be an outcome of trying to be a writer. We think everyday language isn’t good enough. That we have to “prove” our prowess. Clearly, big words don’t make a good writer. Does it?

When I began this writing journey, I had to re-think how I wrote. Business writing is brief, to the point, no fluff, no painting a picture. My writing now is all about trying to seduce the reader into my words, reeling them into my world. Doing this demands trust—it’s hard for most of us to enter a world that is too foreign, that feels too strange. Big words, obscure words, take the reader out of the flow. They jar the reader out of the dream.  My goal is to get a reader to draw the mental picture as the words are absorbed, so slowly that the world is there before the reader knows it.

So my challenge for this post was to use short words. Two beats long at the max. Without the reader knowing it.

Did I succeed?