I like your purple shirt

The impact of saying enough—and nothing more.

One morning, I put on a purple shirt. When I walked into the office around 9 a.m., my lovely coworker paid me a compliment. “Well, aren’t you cute today?” she said, enthusiastically. “That shirt of yours is just so…springlike! The weather in Chicago these days is enough to make all of us eternally depressed. It’s like you’re defying winter with that shirt. But it’s not just the color. It’s really the whole outfit—you’ve got almost a vintage look going on. Very 70s. So beautiful! I think I’ll just steal your clothes sometime.”

I smiled and immediately launched into a response: “Oh, stop, you’re being too kind! I literally just picked this out because I was running late. But yeah, with weather like this, a little color never hurts. And speaking of great style, I love your orange earrings!”

Fast forward a few hours. After a lunch-hour workout, I was gathering up my things in the locker room when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a little girl staring at me.

“I like your shirt,” she said confidently. “Purple is my favorite color!”

Initially a little surprised by her boldness, I soon found myself glowing. I was touched. Scratch that—I was downright flattered.

What was it that this little girl said that made me feel so special? She hardly said anything! And that’s when it hit me: It wasn’t what she did say, but what she didn’t say that had the biggest impact.

The snowball effect

As a writer and editor, I am constantly working with words, crafting and re-crafting sentences to make things sound just right. The process often feels like putting together a puzzle, reordering words, phrases and paragraphs so that it all makes sense. Often, when I’m struggling to make something clear, I add a sentence of explanation. Then another. Then another. Sometimes I delete, but more often I repeat. I slowly dig myself (and my potential readers) into a hole of confusion.

During my years in journalism school, my professors drilled into my head the importance of conciseness. No passive voice. No flowery language. No irrelevant information. But as the years have passed, I’ve found myself slipping into the trap of lazy speaking and writing. When communicating, our instinct is often to say more rather than less. It’s easy to like the sound of our own voice and to want to hear more of it. It’s easy to throw in words like very and literally (see paragraph 2 of this post), which add bulk without any real meaning. It’s easy to substitute a simple word for one that sounds more intelligent (utilize instead of use).

Before we know it, what should have been a simple message has snowballed into a convoluted speech about who knows what. My coworker and I lost the point while rambling on to each other. Were we talking about my shirt? The weather? Vintage clothing? The little girl in the locker room, on the other hand, conveyed to me exactly how she felt using two simple phrases. She said only what was necessary and true, with no further justification or explanation. In turn, I instantly understood what she meant. She liked my shirt because it was purple and purple is her favorite color. Incredible.

Reversing the snowball

Of course, children use simple language because that’s all they know. If adults always spoke and wrote that way, we’d run the risk of sounding robotic, short and unnatural. As this powerful TED-Ed video points out, knowing our audience and the purpose of a message can help us decide when speaking with “big” words is necessary or when simple language will have a greater impact. For example, many novelists are expected to use multisyllabic words and poetic language, and that’s fine. Politicians, though, benefit from short, to-the-point messaging. Discussing the intricacies of the job market during a speech likely won’t capture the attention of the general constituency. A simple “I’ll create jobs” probably will.

Regardless of audience, most communication can improve with a bit of editing anyway. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry David Thoreau had to make cuts when crafting their classic novels. When the instinct is to write more, we should write less. When we find ourselves rambling, we should take a deep breath and consider the core point we’re trying to make. When we struggle for the right word, we should use the first, most basic one that comes to mind. If our audience has to think hard about what we’re saying or writing, we’ve already lost them.

The little girl in the locker room managed to snap me back into reality. She reminded me of the beauty of uncomplicated language and the importance of eliminating fluff. Personally touched and professionally inspired, I responded to her in the best way I could think of: with a simple and heartfelt “Thank you.”