Hot answers tagged word-choice
24
I think that technically the only reason not to use profanity in your writing when you want it is if censorship will prevent you from reaching your target audience.
For example, you want tweens to read your book but their fucking parents won't let them because of the fucking swearing.
Swearing is like salt on food though, too much or on the wrong dishes ...
18
I think Stephen King's comments are helpful in this regard. He says to write what you know. If you work or live around people who swear, quite frankly, you're probably going to have a hard time keeping it out of your books. In which case, I'm not sure you should even try. People swear - that's life. That's just the way things are. If a person doesn't ...
16
Rewriting to avoid "had had" is almost always a good idea. It reads even more terribly than it sounds.
The easy way out is to use a contraction:
I'd had enough of this nonsense and was ready to move on.
...but that's a little cheap. Depending on the context of the quote, you have several options:
Having had enough of this nonsense, I was ready ...
14
First of all, thinking of some conversations as solely the domain of women and some as solely the domain of men is not going to get you anywhere. For example I know of many female computer programmers, women in a male-dominated career field, who can talk circles around most guys when it comes to discussing computer hardware. I know men who enjoy sharing ...
12
I don't use it. I would caution against others using it, or any other thesaurus.
I think that a large, varied vocabulary is a great thing, but the problem with gaining your vocabulary from a reference source rather than from reading prose is that you don't really get the more subtle meanings and shadings. Somebody once said that there's no such thing as ...
11
Here's a technique that can help: Identify each instance of he saw or he heard or he thought. If you're writing a close third person POV, you can often eliminate those by simply saying what he saw or heard or thought. Instead of:
He saw Sandra cross the room.
you can say:
Sandra crossed the room.
Other times the edit isn't quite so simple, but ...
10
I'm not sure if there's a good, quick fix for this. I learned how to write English in an intelligent, formal manner from learning German, and reading lots, and lots, of English.
Anyhow, avoid "kind of" and "sort of." That used to drive my English teachers crazy.
Also avoid the verb "to be" when possible. Sometimes "to be" is the best option, but not as ...
10
Firstly, it's always a good idea to clearly indicate whether the message reflects an actual error, or simply a warning which the user may choose to ignore.
Secondly, try to minimise use of "jargon" terms such as translate, higher precedence, and overrides.
Warning: The 'name1' concept1 is assumed to be a type of 'name3' concept3, not a 'name2' concept2.
...
10
Orson Scott Card answers your question precisely and eloquently in his excellent Character and Viewpoint, under the heading One Name Per Character. Go, read.
For posterity, I'll summarize:
Names should be treated as "invisible words" - they're so common, the reader hardly notices them. You can repeat them as often as you like, without worrying about ...
9
Keep in mind that you can easily swear without swearing. Try one or both of these, where appropriate:
Indirect swearing:
Say that someone swore, just don't go into detail. For example, if J.K. Rowling has her characters swear, what's written is something like: "Ron swore loudly" rather than the word(s) he/she actually said.
In-world swearing:
For sci-fi, ...
8
A thesaurus is helpful when the word you want is "on the tip of your tongue." I look up whatever word I can think of that is closest in meaning to the word I want, and then from there, I "surf" the thesaurus, flipping from word to word, coming closer in approximation to the desired word. I find the exact word I had in mind probably 80% of the time.
A ...
8
Will this do?
I achieved a strong 2:1 in X at Y University and excelled in modules studied during my final year, and received a First in many of them. They included a Financial Analysis and Control module in which I attained a strong First (72%) for a financial performance analysis of Company Z.
You basically have to rephrase to get rid of "whiches". ...
8
Capitals in English are used for proper nouns. Your two examples have slightly different shades of meaning.
One of my favorite subjects was Computational Geometry.
I read that as "One of my favorite subjects was Math 247, the specific course entitled 'Computational Geometry,' taught by Professor Angleton."
One of my favorite subjects was computational ...
8
Sparkling is a bit odd in this context. Sparkling means a light (or many small lights) flashing quickly. It has a connotation of being decorative, or pretty, or expensive (like diamonds, for example). If what you mean to say is that these various ideas were occuring quickly and then being replaced by the next idea, then "flashing through" might be a more ...
7
In English "brain" typically refers to the organ itself. The gray and white matter; the neurons. You probably want to say that we train our minds. In English, the mind is what controls our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The brain is merely the vehicle for our cognitive processes. I don't know if other languages account for the difference between the ...
7
Participles are not -past action- unless they are actually past tense. Your English major friend should learn more about English. "Having tried" would be the past action. What you used was a "verbal adjective." The structure you used is called a participial phrase. While they are valid grammatical structures, they are somewhat antiquated in the modern ...
7
Emails saying "thank you" for something are generally informal; style is less of an issue than simple gratitude and sincerity. So there's really no problem with your email, unless you've got a particular reason to be concerned about eloquence.
If you do want to work in more variety, some good alternatives include:
"I really appreciate [X]" or "Your [X] is ...
7
The problem is actually with "back and forth." That's because back is the return, but in the idiom it's placed before forth, which is the "going out" part. If you use take over and bring back, you'll eliminate some of the confusion. Streamline it and cut some of the figurative fluff.
You want something more like:
The displayed works will take the viewers ...
7
In either case, there's something missing — or maybe it's because the sentence is out of context. Just to say someone washed his hands like a surgeon is insufficient; you need more detail. "He scrubbed his hands for over two minutes" or "thoroughly" or "with meticulous care" like a surgeon etc.
They do have different effects. The first one puts your ...
6
Evaluating resume stuff in a vacuum is really hard. That being said, a couple of thoughts:
In general, I think you're approaching the problem incorrectly. You're trying to write an Objective statement. Everyone knows you're looking for a job, otherwise you wouldn't be submitting your resume, so re-stating this is redundant.
Your style is overly stiff; ...
6
OneLook's Reverse Dictionary seems to offer precisely the kind of tool you're looking for.
However, I don't know that they're very good - I tried get on a plane, but board came back as result #96, well after slip (#3), touchdown (#50), precession of the equinoxes (#66), and fayez banihammad (#85).
From my superficial familiarity with computer language ...
6
In writing nothing is absolutely unacceptable. Absolutely nothing.
You can switch your POV as often as you wish. But if you want that your readers can follow you, it should be comprehensible, or let us say traceable, for them.
So you have to read your text with the eyes of your audience (or find test readers). The problem with your first sentence:
ABC ...
6
Pronouns can be heavily used more readily than other words, because the smaller and more common a word is, the less it "stands out". Readers of English are used to I repeating a lot in first-person writing, because it's appropriate to such expression - the weak inflection means the information other languages would express in the form of the verb requires a ...
6
You have a few things going on here:
1) If the story is first-person, your problem is solved. We rarely address ourselves by our given names in internal monologues.
2) If your story is in third person, then you have a cultural issue.
The children may not get official Names (Starfall, Willow, Runs With Scissors) until they do something to earn it. But you ...
6
I am reminded of the anecdote about Dustin Hoffman torturing himself for Marathon Man because he was a "Method" actor, so he'd look as tortured as his character. Lawrence Olivier looked at him and said, "My dear boy, that's why they call it acting."
Whenever we write, unless we're writing an autobiography, we are always putting ourselves into someone ...
5
I am not a writer. I am a reader. You need my opinion. ;-)
By all means swear but it should be natural. Don't swear just because you want to or don't avoid it just because you don't want to.
Also think about your target audience. Do NOT swear if the book is intended for youngsters.
Because if you do so "target audience" like it BUT their parents don't. ...
5
I see the rationale behind the idea expressed in many of these answers, to stay true to what you think your characters would actually realistically say.
Two things I'd like to add though:
Just as with sex and violence, you can shrink your audience by including swearing. Avoiding offensive language is not just for the prudish and pretentious, a lot of ...
5
I don't know if there's a right answer for this question, but as a reader, I don't mind seeing a "shit" in a book used appropriately. Language can help establish character or set a mood. The line from enough to too much is grey (to me at least) - if it was one character, they could potentially swear in every scene. However, if every paragraph contains ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
