Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly

Students read writing samples, such as personal statements and translated essays, in which plain words had been swapped for longer, fancier ones. Then they rated how intelligent the author seemed.

The fancier the vocabulary, the less clever the writer seemed. The title is the joke: it is a very long way of saying “don’t use long words for no reason”.