• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Vocabulary

Status
Not open for further replies.
Emurelda

Emurelda

Basic
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Location
London
LitBits
0
How do you strengthen yours?

Churchill had an extensive range of lexical knowledge and depth of understanding. But I do find myself struggling with the right words in my novels. Many times...i stare into empty space, thinking hard and long...then try acting out the verb in the attempt that it comes to me. I end up writing as close to the meaning in the hope that during the editing stage the perfect version will emerge.

Any tips please?
This says read more fiction... Yey! :)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size
 
I get most of my vocabulary from reading voraciously (eh, see what I did there? Big words :) ). Seriously, though, I read something like 40-50 books a year. Of course, there are dangers to that. Like having the word in your head while you're speaking but not knowing how to pronounce the darn thing...
 
I fondly remember an English teacher at school who said that the average well-read person had a vocabularly of about 30,000 words. Of course, age has a lot to do with it unless one is an English grad.

I'm working my way through a Patrick O'Brien novel at the moment, and he dredges up so many 'old' words that I cannot imagine how long it took him to write a novel (even without the specifics of sailing a man o' war). I guess that many words would be re-used by him, but just one of his books is an education in itself.
 
Jennifer Stone said:
I took the test, I got 29,900 words. A lot of the longer words I had no clue how to pronounce or what they meant. God help the world if I figure it all out! My brain might explode!
Click to expand...
I think they put words in there that are not even words, to try to catch you if you just click on every check box. They want to know which words you know are false. My guess. Or maybe they're just words I've never seen.
 
Reading books definitely helps your vocabulary. I can be a feast and famine reader, tackling a lot of books in six months then not reading any for a while and I have definitely noticed towards the end of the latter periods that this adversely affects vocabulary - e.g. when I'm trying to write I'll know a word I'm looking for and yet not know it! I'll have to think of a similar word and use a thesaurus to track down the one I've forgotten and as soon as I see it written down my brain will click into gear and remember that it knows (or knew) this word, if any of this makes sense...

So in my experience reading doesn't just increase your vocabulary, it keeps your working vocabulary sharp.
 
David Steele said:
I don't like it when people throw big words into their prose. It makes me go >urk<

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Demonstration of confident vocabulary comes with the ability to write without repetition or redundancy.
Click to expand...


The name Will Self comes to mind here...

George Orwell wrote a famous essay called 'Politics and the English Language' along these lines and I can definitely see the point. However, what is the world without a little extravagance and showmanship?

I expect great authors to wow me with their prose at times and I'm disappointed if they don't - so long as the primary objective of their book isn't to show me how smart they are.
 
Steven McC said:
The name Will Self comes to mind here...

George Orwell wrote a famous essay called 'Politics and the English Language' along these lines and I can definitely see the point. However, what is the world without a little extravagance and showmanship?

I expect great authors to wow me with their prose at times and I'm disappointed if they don't - so long as the primary objective of their book isn't to show me how smart they are.
Click to expand...

Oh, absolutement. That is just so boring.
 
Steven McC said:
The name Will Self comes to mind here...

George Orwell wrote a famous essay called 'Politics and the English Language' along these lines and I can definitely see the point. However, what is the world without a little extravagance and showmanship?

I expect great authors to wow me with their prose at times and I'm disappointed if they don't - so long as the primary objective of their book isn't to show me how smart they are.
Click to expand...
Will Self indeed. He loves to throw obscure words into his prose, and also when he's being interviewed. I'm all for preserving archaic words that are in danger of disappearing, particularly if they're accurate and fun, but it feels like Will Self uses peculiar words to show-off and confuse the reader. Have a look at this article by him : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17777556
 
Emurelda said:
How do you strengthen yours?

Churchill had an extensive range of lexical knowledge and depth of understanding. But I do find myself struggling with the right words in my novels. Many times...i stare into empty space, thinking hard and long...then try acting out the verb in the attempt that it comes to me. I end up writing as close to the meaning in the hope that during the editing stage the perfect version will emerge.

Any tips please?
This says read more fiction... Yey! :)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size
Click to expand...
One thing to consider with language is to tailor the words to who is using them, particularly in speech. Putting yourself into the mind of a character can be a bit of a stretch sometimes, but not everyone is articulate and also certain professions have a recognisable way of expressing themselves, which may involve using cliched phrases. Just think of how policemen, doctors, lawyers and psychiatrists express themselves - we could all do passable imitations of them talking.
The psychological thriller that I wrote was full of police officers who have stiff and formal ways of saying things, and I had to do an abrupt linguistic gear change for the language used by an uneducated drug addict, who was also in a state of shock from having discovered the corpse of a murder victim.
There's the advice given to writers to kill your darlings, which always hovers around tormenting you about a favourite phrase or sentence. Don't be too hasty about eradicating them as too clever-clever, for you might just have written something delightful that readers will enjoy. It's said that reading your work out loud, perhaps recording it to listen to later, is a good way of weeding out bits that don't ring true - and this can include individual words.
Top Tip (but scary) : use your writing programme's search function to find multiple uses of a word or phrase. When I was editing my manuscript, I discovered to my horror that I'd used the word 'red' 94 times - what's wrong with scarlet, mauve, purple, cherry, crimson, flame-coloured, even pink? Granted there are some words that it was unavoidable to use multiple times, for there's only a few ways of saying that someone has been done away with - murdered and killed being the obvious ones, with slain thrown in occasionally, along with homicide.
 
Just read that article Paul and Will Self actually defends himself well. Notably, though, he refrains from using ridiculously long words in the piece. So, guess what, it turns out I enjoy reading him when he restrains himself and writes without showing off and I can't read a page of the novels where he turns into a 'literary athlete' and demonstrates his erudition.
 
Steven McC said:
Just read that article Paul and Will Self actually defends himself well. Notably, though, he refrains from using ridiculously long words in the piece. So, guess what, it turns out I enjoy reading him when he restrains himself and writes without showing off and I can't read a page of the novels where he turns into a 'literary athlete' and demonstrates his erudition.
Click to expand...
I really like Will Self, whenever I see or read him being interviewed. He's so lugubrious and not afraid to be a bit doomy and gloomy. He puts me in mind a bit of a considerate version of Jonathan Miller, who can come across as a frightful intellectual snob, ready to browbeat anyone who disagrees with his opinion . Will would just shrug at anyone who had a different point of view to him, which is somehow more effective.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Café Life Tag Cloud

agent author authors book books cafe calls for submissions competition conferences contests creative writing editing fantasy fear fiction genre greetings huddle inspiration life literature litopia motivation new new member novel novels november philosophy poetry publishing reading romance science fiction self-publishing short stories short story stories story submissions time vanity winners words world writer writers writing writing contests zodiac
Back
Top