Kurt Vonnegut wrote with a razor thing dictionary, making use of wordplay that could be read and understood by the masses.

The father of Slaughterhouse 5 blamed the simplicity of his prose on his old stomping grounds…

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I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

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Wielding his band saw, Vonnegut was able to describe the ornamental worlds he thought-up whilst penning science fiction with language as unornamental as, well, monkey wrench.

While David Ogilvy wrote within a completely different genre than Vonnegut, he shared the novelist’s sentiments.

When Ogilvy felt one of his copywriters at Ogilvy & Mather was getting too fancy with their word use, he gave them the following advice…

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Get on the bus. Go to Iowa. Stay on a farm for a week and talk to the farmer. Come back to New York by train and talk to your fellow passengers in the day-coach. If you still want to use the word, go ahead.

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In closing, if you’re writing or creating something that requires a dictionary or an interpreter to understand, take a bus ride to Iowa.

By Cole Schafer.

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