Donald Trump speaks in very simple words. In fact, Nerve Writer did a fascinating piece on this,
noting that he averages just one syllable per word and speaks at a 4th grade reading level.
Now, I did a video discussing how this makes him much more memorable and persuasive because
what he says sticks in your head like a jingle. This got me thinking that, maybe, I would
benefit by adjusting my speech to match Trump's, but then, I thought of someone else who I
find incredibly charismatic and persuasive, yet who does the exact opposite of Trump.
I feel so jubilant after that racket.
Yeah
People are pumped after all this stuff got thrown off the roof.
Yes
Well that's also enchanting and perhaps, if I haul myself off the roof,
Dave, 11 years ago, when I was still taking drugs, I was a whirling psychotic, a frequenter
of crack houses, whore houses. I was a lunatic. I was ever in jail cells. I was forever in
all sorts of mischief _, spraying blood everywhere, broken glass, crying women everywhere
I went; but some nights, I just stayed in.
So I wanted to explore which is better, big words or small, and should you learn to speak
in one style or the other. So, the first thing to think about is that words' meanings come
from all of the times that you've heard it before.
So when I see a common word like "big" you have thousands and thousands of references, but
when I say a word that means the same thing, like capacious, you have fewer. Now, it's
likely that the only way that you're going to understand capacious at all is if you're
an avid reader. Most people, myself included, will not be able to understand that word without
Google. And what this usually means is that smaller more common words are more easily
understood by a wider audience, hence, why they work for Donald.
I'd beat China all the time.
It will change.
We will win, and we will win, and we will win. Thank you.
This type of speaking has a second advantage, because when a sentence is easy to understand,
then people tend to believe it. It's called the cognitive fluency bias, and basically,
easy equals true to people, and that's why plain-speaking politicians tend to be liked
by the masses, and you can contrast that with the worst style of speaking ever, which is
jargon.
because, look, the pod remain convinced there's a burning platform and we just don't have
the bandwidth to go into a black factory and blow up the paradigms with a white paper.
They don't have it.
That's consulting jargon from House of Lies, and jargon, generally, is just puffed up speech
that is tough to understand but says very little. Now, jargon is meant to hide meaning
and it's used in many professions to keep outsiders out and make the insiders seem smarter
than they are, so you'll see it in consulting, you'll see it in law, medicine, and just about
every white collar profession, and, while, yes, you might have to go along to get along
at the workplace, do not let this slip into your normal speech. It will bore people to
death.
Anyway, small common words increase cognitive fluency, which, basically, makes people trust
you more, but there is still another benefit, which is the immediate emotional impact to
these small punchy words, and Donald says it himself.
I'm telling you, I used to use the word incompetent. Now, I just go on stupid. I went to an Ivy
League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words, but there's
no better word than stupid, right? There is none.
And he uses that word repeatedly to make a point. Imagine how much less of an impact
this next clip would have if he had said incompetent here, instead.
Because our leaders are stupid. Our politicians are stupid.
When there's stupid leaders of the United States...
which means small words have three things going for them. Small words can be understood
by a wider audience. They're believable because of the cognitive fluency bias and they tend
to have a stronger immediate emotional impact, but don't throw the big words out yet because
there's an element that we've left out, which is precision.
Short words are typically imprecise; using bigger ones allows you to paint a picture
and Russell Brand demonstrates this as he talks about his criminal past in this next
clip.
I was a young guy and a drug addict, and that was a part of my world, that kind of nocturnal,
crimson-lit, back alley...
Nocturnal, crimson-lit, back alley. These are all uncommon words which force us to work
a little bit harder. But, assuming that we understand them, they're painting much more
vivid and precise picture, and that's really the main advantage of longer, more uncommon
words. You can communicate much more precisely. Check out Russell Brand _ for his role in The Tempest.
You see how that paints a picture using words that even seem to transport us to the time
period of the story, but everything that I've said up until now is all about understanding,
and the truth is, we don't use words just to be understood. We use words to convey something
about ourselves and our identity.
Big words signal intelligence and if you like Russell's vocabulary, chances are that you
understood most of the words that he uses, or at least, you would like to understand
those words, but to people who do not understand those words, they just seem pretentious.
So here's the rule of thumb. Use the most precise word that your audience will understand.
Now the problem comes in and that some of us were trained against this from a very young
age. We were encouraged to show off the big words that we learned, and we were encouraged
to see anyone who didn't understand those words as dumb, which brings me to the inspiration
for this video, and that was the comment section of the last video that I did on Donald Trump.
I saw there a lot of "smart and educated" people saying how obvious Trump's empty rhetoric
is, but if you insist on communicating with YouTube commenters using words like rhetoric
and sophistry, you're probably not that great of a communicator, and you sure as hell aren't
going to influence anyone to think that you're anything but stuck up.
So the point of this video is not to use big words or use small words. It's to speak in
a way that moves your audience; it's to consider your audience. So you need to be able to adjust,
and it's lazy to blame it on the other person and call names just because you can't get
through to them.
So something that I've been doing that I encourage you to try is practice switching. Go ahead,
have one conversation aiming for precision, and use the perfect word, even if it's longer,
and then, have the next, using words that are understandable by anyone, and if you do
this, you'll become a better communicator because you're learning to tailor what you
say to the audience.
So I hope that you've enjoyed this video. It's very interesting for me to think that
I've been doing this exercise as well. If you're interested in learning more about ways
to make an amazing first impression, we've set up something for you. It's a video that
you can get that has the four emotions that if you make them in this order, you are guaranteed
to make an amazing first impression. It doesn't matter where. It doesn't matter on who's superior
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