Don’t divert readers from your message.
A month ago, the Pickles comic strip offered good wisdom for writers. “A big vocabulary,” one character said, “is like underwear. Everyone should have it. But they shouldn’t show it off.”
There’s good reason for this. Showing off — drawing attention to your writing — diverts readers’ attention from your content. That makes your writing less effective. If you’re writing to stoke your ego rather than to convey a message, you’re in the wrong business for the wrong reason.
If you write to impress, it’s easier to fall off the edge. Consider this attempt to impress members of a social media group dedicated to fashions of the 1930s and ’40s:
If I could take a step back in time,
for an intimate date night,
I’d visit Rick’s Café Américain,
for a night on the town,
with a beguiling Lady,
and dance the night away,
as I gazed into her pulchritudinous eyes. (emphasis added)
Would anyone writing naturally ever use that word?
Vocabulary.com offers this observation: “Though it looks (and sounds) like it would describe a disease or a bad attitude, pulchritudinous actually describes a person of breathtaking, heartbreaking … beauty.” It says, “this 15-letter, 5-syllable beast … may win the award for least-beautiful word meaning ‘beautiful’.”
Communicating with written words is hard enough. Why risk using words beyond some readers’ reach?
