Choose Your Words Wisely

The ability to communicate is the single most important skill determining your success in life. No matter where you are from, what you do, or what position you hold, you have to communicate effectively if you want to succeed. The key word in that last sentence is “effectively.”

According to resume experts, if you want an effective resume, you’d better use the right words when describing your experience. Strong action verbs are a must when identifying your management, technical, creative, financial, leadership, and communication skills. Words like achieved, expanded, improved, reduced (losses), resolved (problems), restored, spearheaded, convinced, initiated, increased, and expedited are just a few of the words the experts have identified as attention-getters; the right words can open a door, and the wrong words can close it.

One of the problems (or benefits) we all face is that we have so many words to choose from. We should all understand that there is no single sensible answer to how many words are in the English language. Merriam-Webster’s most recent edition of the International Dictionary Unabridged contains over 476,000 entries, including an updated Addenda Section with 18,000 new words and meanings. Last year, they added 200 words.

Over the last few years, Merriam-Webster has added some rather interesting words, such as: brain rot, enshittification, the ick, snark, blandify, charge station, spy balloon, spider sense, wind catcher, hashtag, selfie, tweep, gamification, fracking, pho, poutine, steampunk, and Yooper … to name a few.

We can thank or blame (however you want to look at it) technology and social media for adding to our ever-growing vocabulary. We can also thank Shakespeare for expanding the English language. In all of Shakespeare’s work, he used a total of 17,677 different words—over 1,700 of them were new words he created himself. It might surprise you that the Bible has a total of 783,137 words drawn from a collection of only 12,143 different words.

Here’s a stat that might surprise you: most written text (78%) comes from about 2,000 words. The percentage of words we use compared to the total number available to us seems rather minuscule.

But what about communicating through your business website, Twitter account, Facebook page, or connecting on LinkedIn? Are you using up-to-date, powerful, or media-trending words? There’s a way to find out. Google has come up with a very useful tool called the Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams). It’s a word-search database originally compiled from 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2022 (and still growing), which collectively contains over 500 billion digitized words. It allows anyone to plot the trajectories (usage) of words and phrases over time. It’s simple to use and very eye-opening—so check it out and see how the words you are using are trending.

In this day of instant communication, where people are bombarded from every direction by media, you have a small window of opportunity to make your point. I suggest you keep expanding your vocabulary, study trends, evaluate what it is you want to accomplish, and never forget… your words can lead to your success or failure. So, (hashtag):#ChooseThemWisely