It would probably be better if I had the link to that old online tool based on Orwell’s Politics in the English Language but unfortunately no luck with Google keywords.

It worked simply enough. You copy paste and instead of a spell checker, it would be a phrase checker and alert you to complicated words you were using.

At first, I was wowed because any simple and free tool to help would have been great for anyone with problems communicating.

Talking as if you’re speaking in real life doesn’t really work if in real life, you also have problems communicating.

It REALLY REALLY ESPECIALLY REALLY doesn’t work when you already talk online as if you’re talking offline.

There are lots of other factors why it doesn’t work but eventually I found I used the tool less and less because I would copy paste something long in it and it won’t detect anything redundant but it didn’t really help me better communicate my online posts.

Just some of the few factors to prove why it doesn’t work are:

1. Dialect always changes especially online. (Good luck making sense of LOLCATZ talk when you have no knowledge of the meme.)

2. Most modern browsers support easy context menu searches of highlighted words.

3. Any complicated words can be linkified to it’s definition.

4. It still won’t change the fact that if you want to portray an issue in a more complex and complicated manner, brevity is lost and no amount of simple words will make your text seem shorter.

5. You can apply every other copywriting advises on this blog and ignore this and it will still improve your article. You can apply every copywriting advises on this blog — including this article — and the added improvement is so nil it’s basically irrelevant. (Not to mention applying other advises would already make you go down the road of using less complicated words.)

6. If this was really a big issue, no software maker would have made much of a profit online. (Every program eventually uses complicated tech jargon no matter the marketing.)

7. If you have a dedicated community that comments regularly to any of your blog article, they will already suggest and clarify any word that seems confusing to them.

Most importantly:

The biggest flaw of this suggestion is that it assumes “complication of the word” is the issue and not the “message to the culture”.

Yes, you did hint that there’s a cultural aspect with the whole “dialect of the readers”.

Unfortunately your advises turned it all around on the word and that is what makes it the biggest flaw.

Almost 99% of people who are passionate about their blogging, already consider making their articles “clear”.

From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone who thinks: “Oh, I’ll say incalculably dreadful because “sucks” makes me sound dumber.”

That just doesn’t happen unless the person already doesn’t care for their audience. By which case, they won’t really be needing this article or this article could simply be summed up into “Stop pretending you are smart.”

Instead what normally happens is that sincere people encounter a situation where they don’t know how to communicate a point or a message as clearly as possible without going through a certain amount of length.

A length that is neither short or long in their mind but focused on content. (Regardless whether the end result hits or misses the mark of clarity — they still tend to look towards aligning the message to the culture when they were typing it. It just constantly misses the mark.)

Unfortunately this issue with using complicated words end up becoming used as a straw man because it’s much easier to scapegoat a word or a long sentence than it is to address the delivery of the content. This holds true both from the confused writer’s perspective and from the lazy critic’s side of the argument.

Of course this being copyblogger, you’re not really saying that this is the only (or most likely) problem with why your article failed and pushed readers away.

It’s just still worth noting because, even with the above factor, I feel you’re still creating a disingenuous straw-man just to sell the idea that the flaw you’re thinking of is really a flaw.

For example, how does:

“If you have literary aspirations, either write for a literary readership or write a book.”

…make sense at all?

You’re not talking about videobloggers here, you’re talking about bloggers.

Do you mean to say that anyone who writes a book automatically gets published because they have “literary aspirations”?

…or that every bestseller became a bestseller because the writer thought in this vague “literary aspirations” mindset instead of making their texts clear but informed?

Even writing for a “literary readership” creates the fallacy that said blogger knows how to speak the dialect of the literary blog-reading community.

In the end, the whole premise (or at least the advises) unravels and only seems agreeable because the problem seems like it exist and possesses major consequences.

Just talk like you would outside of your computer and nobody gets hurt.