100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Use short words
Twelve ways to give your words power

Short words tend to be more powerful and less pretentious than longer words. Rape is a powerful term; sexual assault isn’t. Stop is stronger than discontinue.

The fastest way to learn why you should use short words is to read anything by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, the Nobel Prize winner who lands on almost everybody’s list of great American writers, was a miser when it came to syllables and words. This paragraph, which I picked at random from his The Sun Also Rises, contains only two words with more than two syllables.

Finally, after a couple more false klaxons, the bus started, and Robert Cohn waved good-by to us, and all the Basques waved good-by to him. As soon as we started out on the road outside of town it was cool. It felt nice riding high up and close under the trees. The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from the bluff above the river. The Basque lying against my knees pointed out the view with the neck of a wine-bottle, and winked at us. He nodded his head.