Sometimes Simple is Better

So my little sister recently said that I need more variety in my language for my novel.  I was indignant, to say the least.

First off, if you divide the number of words I have by the number of sentences in my novel, you come up with an average of nine words per sentence.  The number of unique words (words I used once and no other time) to words overall comes to 1:8.  Statistically speaking, every time you read a sentence in my book, you’d find a word that didn’t appear ANYWHERE ELSE, in my ENTIRE novel.

Aside from that, trying to show-off your giant vocabulary is actually a freshman-level mistake.  People seem to have this misconeption that in order to be cultured you have to know a lot of different and obscure words and read a bunch of different and obscure novels while watching a plethora of different and obscure films, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  That is such a lie.

Read what you love, watch what you love, write what you love.  Yeah, sure, you want to break up the monotony in your writing by inserting a couple of synonyms, but sometimes people will look up the definition of a word and use the correct denotation without knowing how the word is commonly used.  Take, for example, this instance that I experienced with a dude who had a penchant to add large words unnecessarily in his diction, and I asked him to please stop:

Dude: Yeah but saying larger words give this a… sonic… sonically-induced pleasure.

Me: Auditory.

Dude: What?

Me:  You mean “auditory pleasure”.  “Sonic” is more about the measure of sound, “auditory” refers to a person hearing a thing.

He concedes, and then in the back of my head I predict that he’d eventually look the word up to prove me wrong.  Five minutes later:

Dude [after looking the word up]:  Sonic, “relating to or using sound waves”, see? I told you I was right.

I’m not stating a tautology when I say that this mistake is juvenile; jamming in as many different words as you can to show off what you know is actually ineffective.  When writing, you have to keep your reader’s attention span constantly in mind.  If every other word is not only unfamiliar to the reader, but also inappropriately used, then the reader will have no idea what you’re talking about.  The result will be that you won’t come off learned and wise, but pompous and ignorant.

That being said, repeating the same word or phrase ad infinitum can get pretty boring, so some variety is warranted when it comes to writing to keep your reader interested.  My rule of thumb is to pick one or two synonyms for the principle word I’m using, and switch them out after every sentence.  Writing, of course, is not an exact science (about the only exact thing you can say about it), so you may discover a different method to keep your reader interested and while not coming off as either droning or overly grandiose.

But the only way you’ll find that out is if you keep writing.

So get to it.  See you next week.