Guest Post: Words Gone Wild
Filed under Advice • 25-05-2010 •
In this week’s guest post, fantasy author R. L. Copple discusses the importance of using the right words to communicate with your audience.
Words Gone Wild
R. L. CoppleWhen I was a teen, my mom asked me to mop the floor while she ran an errand. When she returned, she stared at the floor and said, “Rick, I asked you to mop the floor.”
“I did,” I told her.
“But it’s still dirty. You didn’t clean it.”
“Oh, was that what I was supposed to do?”
She couldn’t believe it, but the fact was that no one had ever told me the purpose of mopping. All I ever saw her do is put water on the floor and make it shiny, until the water dried up anyway. I had no clue there was anything more to it than that.
Sometimes I admit in writing I feel the same way, especially when it comes to words. My vocabulary can stand some improvement. The classic moment was in critiquing someone’s story and they had a phrase much like this one, “…but her foot failed to gain purchase and she fell over…”
I blinked. Gain purchase? What is she purchasing? She must have made a mistake. Even in my forties, I’d never heard anyone use that word in any other way than buying something. Since then I’ve seen the word in several other stories, and even though I know what it means now, it always makes me laugh because my first thought is always, “What are they buying?”
But it does illustrate the difficulty in the task of writing. Choosing one’s words so that they not only create a feel, a picture, a culture, but also do the one thing most important for a writer, to communicate, is a tightrope any author walks. Finding the word that isn’t mundane, but won’t go over your readers’ heads is the never ending task.
And I’ve run across some writers who feel it is their job to educate their readers and send them vocabulary words to look up. That’s fine and dandy if that’s actually what the author’s readers want, if that’s their purpose in picking up your story, to learn new words. But I seriously doubt most people pick up a fantasy or science fiction book in order to gain a better vocabulary. They grab that book for one primary reason: to be entertained. If that doesn’t happen, then neither will any other side mission your story will have, because few will read it to get that education. To put it differently, if a story is written and no one reads it, does it really exist?
And the truth is, fancy words can get in the way of entertainment. For entertainment to happen, the reader needs to sink into the book, the world, and enjoy the story. Anytime words or phrases or analogies call attention to themselves, it distracts from the entertainment of the story itself. If a person has to stop the story to figure out what a word means, the story is put on pause and story-immersion no longer has a grip on the reader.
Am I saying to dumb it down? No! I’m saying, know your audience and write so you can communicate clearly with them, and keep them in the story. But you can’t write fearing that a particular word will ruin it for them either. You write what you know, what is natural to you and the characters. Even I, the vocabulary-impaired, will use words that others won’t know what they mean. Usually a reader can figure out from context what was meant, but throw too many of those in there and it becomes work for them instead of fun.
Rather, I’m saying don’t intentionally use obscure words in an attempt to sound literary when the real goal should be to paint a picture in your reader mind. As Paul said in the Bible, if someone blows a trumpet but doesn’t know what the signal means, then its purpose is defeated. If you confuse the reader regularly, you’re not going to keep them entertained very long, if at all.
Know your audience, and chose the words that will speak to them in unique and exciting ways. Write with meaning.
What words do you find over-the-top?
I’m one of those that looks up words as I read, but do that for adult fiction, not writing for kids. When I write for kids, I do keep in mind their vocabulary level, but don’t mind sprinkling some more “difficult” words into the story, usually making sure the meaning is clear by the connotation in which they find the words.
I agree that we should never use words to show off our vocabularies when we write. Dumb it down–never! But, don’t be pretentious either.
Thanks Katie and Kat. I agree. I think part of the joy of reading is stretching your vocabulary, especially as a young adult reader. However, I also think that a writer has a duty to communicate as clearly as possible. Obscure and/or excessively flowery words break up the flow of the narrative and threaten to destroy the reader’s concentration. If they close your book to look something up in a dictionary, they may not open it again.
I find that when people have trouble understanding me I’m often using the wrong big word anyway. I had the biggest trouble with the word peruse which is actually opposite of browse.
Hey, great comments, everyone. There’s always a balance for sure. Like Gareth says, and my main point, the primary responsibility is to communicate clearly, however that’s best for your audience. And for fiction, the one goal that has to be met is to entertain. When anything gets in the way of that, every other purpose one might have in writing the story suffers as well, because if it isn’t entertaining, few will read it.
While expanding reader’s vocabularies is a good goal, if it gets in the way of keeping them entertained, then it is shooting yourself in the foot.
Thanks for the comments.
I should add, the issue of communicating clearly extends to non-fiction as well. In my former life, I was a pastor and did many a sermon. It would have been easy to throw around my theological vocabulary to impress the masses. But if I did that, it would only confuse them and I would have been boring to listen to.
So even non-fiction writers have to be balanced in the words they use, and know their audience, even if for them entertainment isn’t the main purpose of what they write.