Here are two things that are both true, according to recent research. People who choose harder, more effortful words when they apologize are perceived as more sincere. People whose apology sounds too smooth, too rehearsed, are perceived as less sincere. Set those two findings side by side and they seem ...Read More
Here is the contradiction sitting inside one of the most commonly used words in English. "Literally" exists to do one job: to tell a listener that what follows is not an exaggeration, not a figure of speech, not a colorful way of putting things, but the plain truth. And ...Read More
Picture the message landing in your inbox. It opens with your name, maybe even a pleasant enough greeting, and then, three words in: "Per my last email." Nothing about the sentence that follows is rude on paper. It is polite, grammatically clean, and technically just a pointer back to ...Read More
Researchers at Binghamton University once handed a group of undergraduates a stack of short text-message exchanges and asked them to rate how sincere each reply sounded. The messages were identical in almost every case. The only thing that changed, from one version to the next, was whether the final ...Read More
Based on a common picture of dictionary editors as gatekeepers, they sit in judgment on which new words are legitimate enough to let through the door. The actual process runs the other way. A word doesn't get approved and then start appearing in print — it has to appear, repeatedly, ...Read More
A common assumption treats simple sentences as a sign of simple thinking, and long, elaborate ones as evidence of a sharper mind behind them. The research on how readers actually judge writing points the other way, and the tools built to measure readability were never designed to reward simplicity ...Read More