For the Love of Words

 

I love words. I read dictionaries for fun. I read the words aloud to discover which flow from my tongue, and which cause me to stumble. I love to unearth new, unfamiliar words and to revisit old friends. Words matter. It’s not just about meaning and communication. They create the rhythm of your writing. Word choice is an art. It’s rare for me to review a draft for a professional piece I’ve written and not change maybe 10% of the words. It’s about using words that your readers understand, but that they probably don’t use. You want to keep your writing fresh and interesting, and avoid overusing certain words and phrases.

Words are the building blocks for what writers do. Appropriate word choice helps make your meaning clear, and helps you avoid that enemy of lax communication – confusion.

Of course not all of the confusion when we communicate comes from the actual words. Some of it is the result of how we string them together. By using fewer words, and striving to use words accurately, we make it easier for our readers to know exactly what we are saying. And by making sure our sentences aren’t too long, we make sure they remember what happened at the beginning of the sentence when they get to the end.

When writing in English you have a lot of words to choose from. According to the Oxford English Dictionary’s website, the second edition contains, “... full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).” The site then suggests that there are at least a quarter of a million distinct English words.

So when you’re lost for words, you can be fairly confident that the right word to express what you want to express exists – take the time to look for it. It’s fun and your writing will thank you for it.