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I'm going to be real. I was part way through an explanation before I deleted it. What you are dealing with sounds like a situation where you simply won't win by using logic. To continue to labor under the presumption that a good and logical reasoning will have an effect is just going to stress you out and achieve nothing.
IT nerds help me out here, but I've been under the impression that the best defense against brute force attacks is a very long password, and the idea of sprinkling in special characters or numbers is outdated. Something like "iwenttothestoreandboughtabirthdaycake" is a more secure password than "$6jds_*WghP6".
edit: Also the mantra to never write down any passwords is more of a workplace piece of advice. I personally think, and this would probably be helpful for older people, that writing down passwords in a notebook which is kept secure in their home is pretty safe. Short of a home invasion, that notebook is safe, and having it can encourage them to diversify their passwords on different accounts. So, if you are going to keep at the issue, taking an angle of using something they are more comfortable with like a paper notebook is going to be accepted more easily than trying to sell them on a password manager or something.
As far as I know, the thing is that randomly chosen words will be more secure because there's simply too many words. However, sentences will be more predictable. And a single word will give quick access to someone with a sufficient wordlist.
Honestly, I don't remember what exactly my recommendation was, just that I recommended against something quite simple (common word), and that she shouldn't tell me or anyone else what it is.
The difference for random Vs chosen sentences is when brute forcing a password (short of a few common or predictable sentences) the attack works by trying out combinations of different words randomly (if they're even that advanced in the first place instead of using characters). That means any sentences you come up with, based on 3 things in the room, are so unpredictable that it doesn't matter that they aren't truly random.
You can also change the space characters. Use - then _ then + and repeat:
Instead of
iwentshoppingformilklastsaturdayuse can usei-went_shopping+for-milk_last+saturday. The amount of variables are just too high for it to truly matter.Now all you need to deal with is the banking login being so poorly designed it only allows a max of 8 characters or BS like that, in which case you've lost before you even started.
And once I came across even better limitation. "Only English characters and numbers are permitted. Passwords are case-insensitive."
OK, the last one wasn't actually mentioned, but I just found out the case didn't matter either.
Yikes, you just know those are stored in a file called
passwords-donotsteal.txt...The fourth largest bank in America, Wells Fargo, has cases insensitive passwords