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OK, I’m being harsh – and imprecise. Wondering whether your vocabulary is good is a valid concern (at least for beginner or intermediate authors). The “pointless” part of the title is there to offer a quick response: Whether your vocabulary is good or not is not as crucial as you might think.

If you remember my post about writing vivid descriptions, when I was a young and stupid author I thought I needed to write whole pages describing a wall; or a table; or a cup of coffee.

What I didn’t mention in that post – though it’s perhaps implied – is that having a vocabulary that is good plays an integral part in such… strategies.

Whether that’s important or not is something we’ll explore in this post.

A Vocabulary That Is Good Doesn’t Assure Quality

As I mentioned in the introduction, if your goal is to write extended descriptions, a vocabulary that is good – rich, diverse, in accordance with the genre – is essential. In other words, if you spend several paragraphs describing the sea, there’s a limit to how many times you can describe the waters as blue. Pretty soon you realize you should start using words such as stormy (or calm); deep (or shallow); rough (or smooth).

Within reason, that’s indeed a good thing. I mean, it’s obvious that good, functional descriptions help you situate your readers in the world of your novel. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you over-do it, excessively extending your descriptions, then not only will the pace suffer, but you’ll discover you need the Oxford English Dictionary to find new words. Let’s describe, I don’t know, a coffee mug – that’s what I’m holding right now (drinking some pretty strong coffee, may I add), so that’s what we’ll use.

The Limit of Descriptions

OK, so here goes…

The mug I’m holding is made of porcelain; it’s entirely white, its size ordinary. Its handle is thin, slightly chipped on the inside, revealing a faint beige surface… It’s half-full, containing dark brown filter coffee, that merrily splashes against the wall as I’m holding the mug.

Well, that’s it… I mean, exactly how much can you talk about a bleeping mug? Yet, that’s exactly what some of us think we must do – just because some author we’ve read has been doing it.

The thing is, once you start focusing more on thesaurus rather than your story, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. Stephen King – who, let it be known, is not among my favorite authors – once said something in the direction of “any word you have to search for in a dictionary is the wrong one” or something like that.

That’s absolutely the case. If you already know words such as azure, cerulean, or turquoise, then go ahead and use them. If blue or cyan is your limit, then that’s fine too.

There are far worse things than not knowing the word cerulean; not having anything to say, for example.

A Vocabulary – Good or Not – Doesn’t Replace Creativity

A phrase attributed to Beethoven is “To play a wrong note doesn’t matter, but to play without passion is unforgivable.”

Allow me to paraphrase that and say: “Not to have a 100,000-word vocabulary doesn’t matter; to write not having anything to say is unforgivable.”

Bottom line, don’t worry about expanding your vocabulary as a writer. Or, to put it this way, don’t worry about it while writing. Expanding your vocabulary is important, and it is something all of us should be doing, continuously. It’s a never-ending process, because languages are infinite; concepts never end.

But guess what? It’s also an organic process. Those stupid web pages that prompt you to learn a word a day, or stuff like that, they’re way off the mark. The best – actually, the only – way to expand your vocabulary and learn new words is by reading.

That’s how you learn organically. You learn words only when you encounter them in a context that makes sense and appeals to you; in other words, in an affective framework – when you’re emotionally aware of language, as a result of the story, or text in general.