a person’s vocabulary consists almost entirely of words, where does he obtain these words? Some of our words may be found in a standard dictionary, while others derive from other motorists. But most of our words are extracted from books, magazines, and newspapers. Yes, reading fertilizes writing. Television, being relatively inarticulate, does little for vocabulary and even less for spelling. Radio, worse, as one can’t read lips. As for the Internet, vocabulary is in a dot coma. All menu and little nutrition.
Reading! It is a fact that reading almost always involves words, outside of China. Some of these words have more than one syllable. Read these words often enough and eventually their meaning will sink in, becoming a usable part of the vocabulary you need to keep handy for writing.
Don’t fret about spelling. Correcting spelling is your editor’s job and is the reason she makes more money than you do. Likewise punctuation. (Fussing over punctuation is donkey work and will be further ignored in the section on style. However, if you have a serious addiction to the semicolon, you may need personal counselling.)
Concern yourself with the important task of choosing, what the French call le mot juste, or the exact word, with a pickiness usually associated with selecting the right dinner wine. If you drink plonk regardless of what you are scoffing up for supper, you may carry this laxity into your writing. If we had to fight a cork to access our vocabulary, we all might be more attentive, appraising every word for its robust or subtle colour … bouquet … unique taste. It may help to think of yourself as a literary sommelier. Apron optional.
It is equally important to use active verbs rather than passive, overweight, or otherwise indolent layabout verbs. Because the verb is essential to the description of action, it is hard to write a novel, for instance, without using a verb at some point in the story. If verbs make you nervous, it may be prudent to confine your writing to government reports, greeting cards, and dinner menus.
As for nouns, their worth shouldn’t be judged on the basis of how many syllables they contain. Just because your vocabulary happens to include a word of more than two syllables isn’t reason enough to work that word into every sentence.
It is better to build a sentence with concrete nouns rather than those of the abstract variety, which should be reserved for writing philosophy, economics, or family letters. (A concrete word evokes something we can see, smell, hear, touch, or apprehend while sober.)
Nouns may also be divided — after some initial confusion — into proper nouns or improper nouns. Proper nouns are found mostly in non-fiction, improper nouns in public washrooms, along with improper verbs and improper adjectives (aka ejaculations).
A noun may also be a gerund, which is a verb masquerading as a noun. The gerund used to be a declinable noun, but now it says yes to everything. A sign of the general moral decline of society?
So what about those so-called dirty words? How do you:
1. Identify a trope as truly filthy?
2. Avoid the overuse of obscenities for their shock value?
3. Judge their suitability in a children’s book?
These shady elements of vocabulary are often called “four-letter words” because a careful audit does confirm that most, if not all, contain four letters.
Without doubt the most problematic, especially in kids’ books, is “the eff-word.” Since the eff-word is one of the most frequently used locutions — especially in heavy traffic — and demonstrates amazing versatility (“eff off,” “eff all,” “eff up,” and of course the last word in intimacy, “eff you”), it requires a conscious effort to spare your computer this phrase it has heard all too often.
However, the writer shouldn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade unless, of course, it is a shovel, which has a somewhat different shape.
STYLE
Now that you have a decent supply of words, sorted and laundered for a public appearance, how do you assemble them to provide maximum effect?
First, they gotta have rhythm.
Just because today’s poets have rejected rhythm as a vestige of giving the reader pleasure, there’s no reason for other writers not to make it an element of their style. In moderation. But not the rhythm of the lullaby. Excessive rhythm should be confined to church service homilies and company boardroom reports.
Remember: the message travels from the eye to the brain via the ear, possibly with a pit stop at the genitals.
Today the sonorous rhythms of the Victorian novelist — and even Charles Dickens could be pure Ovaltine — have given way to those of faster-paced prose and staccato verse. The violin section has been turfed in favour of the percussion. Think of your pen as a jackhammer. If it helps, write wearing a hard hat.
Some literary analysts believe that rhythm is something a writer is born with in lieu of common sense. If you can dance, you can waltz through a compound sentence.
The pleasurable pacing of your prose — a phrase demonstrating that alliteration can be a sedative — depends very much on your cunning use of punctuation.
Punctuation is like the neighbourhood pub: it can be either “open” or “closed,” and is often a factor in alcoholism.
Although it is best not to become a fanatic about your punctuation, there have been ugly scenes resulting from arguments about abuse of the exclamation mark (!), aka “the schoolgirl shriek,” as emphasis rather than exclamation (“‘Shit!’ cried the Duchess”). But certain rules do apply:
1. Reserve the question mark (?) for completed interrogation. It should not be used internally. (“My friend [?] ran off with my wife”). Cute punctuation is largely responsible for the high suicide rate among editors.
2. The assertive sentence has its period (.) regardless of whether it is pregnant with meaning.
3. No one uses the semicolon (;) anymore. The difference between a pause (comma) and a full stop (on the dot) has become too subtle for today’s faster-paced writing.
4. Italics may add emphasis and a dash of Chianti but could cause your computer to overheat.
Remember: “the style is the man himself” (Buffon, a certified eighteenth-century count). Your writing style says a lot about you as a person. It can reveal you as a Scrooge (closed punctuation), or demonstrate that you are a generous soul in whose mouth butter would refuse to melt (the vowels of compassion).
Don’t count on your computer to sweeten your style. That bitch is just waiting to demonstrate that, with you, the style is the monster.
FIGURES OF SPEECH
Despite the name, we don’t need to be speaking in order to use figures of speech. They can work equally well in writing. In moderation.
Excessive use of simile or metaphor can slow a novel down to a snail’s pace. (See? that one snuck in right there.) This can be absolutely fatal to a screenplay, let alone a financial report.
The two most abused figures of speech are the simile and the metaphor. “Quick as a flash” is an example of a simile that has gone into menopause. (A metaphor there, possibly offensive, for demonstration purpose only.)
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