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 at work, in social life, anything. These are
human things that drive behavior. So, if you're curious about those four emotions and the
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to the channel. We have new ones of these every single Monday. We have videos on Charisma
Breakdowns. We have talking head videos with advice, all those kinds of things, and those
come out every single Monday. If you want to guide where the next video goes, go ahead,
in the comments, let me know what you're thinking. If there's somebody specifically that you'd
like me to do a breakdown of, or a topic like this--Big Words, Small Words--whatever it
is, go ahead and write that in the comments. Either way, I look forward to seeing you again
next Monday in the next video.
This was good.
TLDW: consider the intelligence of your target audience and adjust your vocabulary as such. If your audience is stupid, use small simple words. If your audience is smart and sophisticated use sophisticated words.