Often, the clear-cut writer who wants to be understood by the majority of the audience would never fail to recognise and appreciate the need to sound simple and straightforward. And that is the basic requirements expected of the journalist or the reporter to make sense and convince the target publics. The public speakers too are not exempted here, especially when it involves communicating or speaking before a mixed audience to get them act or buy one’s idea or opinion. On the other hand, jargons or technical/scientific expressions could be considered as all exclusive as only a narrow assembly of people would understand the language.
However, this is the approach adopted in scientific conferences, seminars and workshops that are meant to address phenomenon that threaten life, such as diseases of the magnitude that could alter or affects human existence, that immediate and long-term solutions must be found to nip it in the bud. But still, in such circumstance, the mass media plays a crucial role to get the people aware of the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs in exposing the multifaceted issues, negatively or positively, that impact on human beings and his environment. That is where the writer, journalist and the reporter become involved in breaking down these jargons or scientific statements to its simplest form or vocabulary.
To convincingly push through his or her duties of informing, educating and entertaining the wide or mix audience, who are the end consumers of the information, the media personalities use the different channels and platforms to decode the message, and to effectively engage the people they consider, employing familiar words or vocabularies the reading publics can crack without stress. Then comes the choice of grammar and word power; they go a long way towards passing the information unambiguously across to be comprehended and easily assimilated. Now, consider these options of word power and grammar that could either make or mar one’s write-up or story to tell. Monosyllabic, disyllabic or polysyllabic words. Let me give this clue to make the right choice of grammar if the intention is to meet as many people’s taste.
Talking about the mass or plural audience one wants to capture. In this case, addressing a cross section of the population without missing anyone comes to mind, down to the school pupil and the kindergarten. Don’t the terminologies, monosyllabic, disyllabic and polysyllabic sound complicated and appear like scientific statements, especially to the stranger or learner of the language? Yes, they do, and then the intervention of the writer, and perhaps, with the aid of the dictionary to unravel the seeming difficult words, interpret them to the understanding of the listening and reading audience. For the avoidance of doubt, monosyllabic words, from the grammar “mono” (one), is a single syllable word we are used to in daily conversations, such as beans, buy, bread, heat, jump, yes etcetera. Disyllabic expressions accommodate two-syllable words, such as baren, butter, daughter, eager, eagle, ego and so on.
While polysyllabic words, as the name implies, suit three or more syllable statements as in admission, examination, internationalism, polytechnic, technology, university and more. When tempted to use any of these phrases, weigh your audience in order not to waste the message. The kind of population size you want to reach would determine the choice of language. For the mass media, for example, keep the language short, simple and straightforward to the point to create the desired impact for them to make informed choices. That is the bottom line of mass communication.
And so, with this in mind, the writer, journalist and the reporter should think more of using short sentences, or better still, imbibe the habit of engaging the one-syllable word or monosyllabic grammar, such as “buy” rather than “purchase,” “met,” for “gather together,” “act,” for “expedite,” “plus,” for “in addition to,” among others space wouldn’t permit me to exhaust here. Get me right, I am not saying two, three or more syllable words should completely be discarded, but that it should be used sparingly when it is inevitable to so do, so long as the message is delivered without hiccups, and to the understanding of the media consumers.
