Over the years, I’ve written more than a few essays and stories. When you write and study the art of writing, you pick up the kinds of word choices you need to use to improve your writing. You also learn that there are word choices that scream “I’m an amateur” or even “I’m a bad writer.” Avoiding them is the first step to improving your writing.
These are the top five word choice tips and tricks I’ve learned from writing over the years.
1. Show, Don’t Tell.
“Show, don’t tell” is such a cliché that even non-writers would’ve heard of it. However, just because it is cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true. A lot of amateur writers have a difficult time writing descriptively, making it difficult for the reader to imagine the scene as they read it. To see what I mean, compare this:
Michael was afraid of the dark.
To this:
As his mother switched off the light and left the room, Michael tensed. He huddled under the covers, gripped the sheets, and held his breath as the wind brushed past the curtain.
Humans are very visual animals. By giving your readers an image to associate with whatever story or message you want to tell, you make your writing that much more convincing. Telling might get the point across quicker, but it might not give your readers the information they need to buy into whatever narrative you want to sell them.
I suggest checking out this video by Reedsy. It contains some more great tips on how to use descriptive language in your writing.
2. Avoid Said Bookism
Most people understand that repeating the same word over and over again is a sign of bad writing. Repetition makes your writing boring. If I wrote a story in which I described different things as “awesome,” the word loses its meaning and functions like a verbal tic, a meaningless word that serves only as filler. When writing a story, an author might be tempted to avoid using the word “said” by using a thesaurus. Unfortunately, those authors fall into the trap of doing a “said bookism.”
The problem with said bookism is that it’s a type of purple prose. Purple prose is writing so ornate and extravagant that disrupts the narrative flow. Purple prose is bad for the same reason that repetition is: namely, it just takes up unneeded space and makes your writing difficult to read. Purple prose may have been in style during the nineteenth century, but modern readers don’t like it. If you write multiple paragraphs filled with lurid details about the punch you drank at a recent party, your readers’ eyes will glaze over and skip that part.
As tempting as it may be to use words like “exclaimed”, “emoted”, “sighed”, “rumbled”, “hissed”, “pontificated”, and “enquired” in the place of “said” or “asked,” such words can be ridiculous. For one thing, most who use “said bookisms” don’t take into account the image these words paint in the reader’s head. For example, if your characters are sneering, heckling, or growling at every line, your reader might think that they are angry all the time.
Most of the time, you don’t need to worry about using the word said too much. Readers are so used to it that they mentally skip over it whenever they see it, which is why said bookisms are so distracting. If you do want to spice up your dialogue tags, the best way to do that is by using a speaker’s posture, expression, or body language. Peppering your dialogue scenes with these descriptions can create evocative images in your reader’s mind.
3. Avoiding the “Burly Detective” Syndrome
Another form of purple prose is what’s called the “burly detective” syndrome. This is where the writer goes out of their way to avoid character names and pronouns, instead opting for character descriptions. So instead of using “John said” or “he said,” they will use “the red-headed wizard said” or “the burly detective said.” Of course, nothing is wrong with using such descriptions sparingly, but like all forms of purple prose, it’s distracting.
Like the word “said,” readers tend to treat names and pronouns as though they are invisible. This means that repeating them is less likely to draw their attention than avoiding them. However, beginning fiction writers and journalists tend to forget this fact, resulting in stories about “burly detectives” that are hardly ever named or articles about carrots that describe them exclusively as “popular orange vegetables.” Such descriptions are only necessary when the trait described is relevant to the scene. For example, if the fact that Michael Shayne is a burly detective is related to a conversation the characters are having, it might be helpful to emphasize this in the text. Otherwise, the author should stick to a proper name or pronoun.
4. Misusing words
Language is a funny thing. You can come up with grammatically-correct sentences that wind up being complete nonsense, like “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” This might seem like a pretty academic point, and it was when Noam Chomsky brought this up in his writing. However, this fact about language will make your life as a writer that much harder if you rely on your spell checker to catch typos. The most insidious typos are often homophones of what you meant to type.
It’s difficult for computers to read context clues or the meaning of passages. You can create an AI that scans a novel for the word “jealousy,” but it could never tell from the contents of the book whether the novel is about jealousy. Similarly, if you are writing a school report on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the computer program won’t be able to tell you made a mistake if you start describing Lucifer’s rebellious angels as “the rouge angles of satin.” That’s why human editors are irreplaceable.
The only way to prevent such typos is having an encyclopedic knowledge of commonly misused homophones. A basic writer should know the difference between affect and effect, allowed and aloud, breath and breathe, its and it’s, your and you’re, and more. If you don’t, then you might want to have an encyclopedia like that out in front of you while you type.
5. Using Dialogue Appropriate to the Setting
It’s understandable to want to meet your audience halfway and use their language to describe what you want to talk about. However, when your fantasy story’s evil overlord sounds like a ten-year-old sitcom character, you may have a problem (unless you intended your story to be a comedy). And before you ask, yes, the example I gave is real. It comes from The Secrets of Droon series. Believe me when I say that nothing takes your reader out of the story like anachronistic dialogue.
The most common form this takes is having modern teens use outdated slang. When I was a kid, I’d watch cartoons where the characters used “totally radical” lingo from decades ago. Nowadays, it takes the form of misuse of emojis, often with hilarious results. The easiest way to prevent this is to know the language of the demographic you write. Don’t rely on your prejudices or stereotypes of how you think a certain group speaks – do the due diligence and learn how that group talks. You’ll save yourself from the embarrassment.
Truth be told, I’ve made all of these mistakes and more in my past writing. Hopefully, my experience can give any aspiring writers out there the tools they need to avoid them. If not, learning to forgive yourself and learn from your slipups is an invaluable skill you ought to learn. It certainly helped me!