July 4, 2022
“Is my Vocabulary Good?” Is a Pointless Question
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.
7 Comments
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Words stick – when you use them. Reading is such a use. And the more you did as a kid, because you loved it, the better your vocabulary – because you learned so many of those words in different contexts, forming your own dictionary in your head.
I still have lots of words I’ve never used out loud. Every once in a while someone gets thanked – because I finally get to use a word in conversation. Instinctively, I knew there were the ordinary, every-day words – and the others that my interlocutors wouldn’t have in their vocabulary, so I didn’t use them. My kids still tease me about some of them – they had a hard time stumping me when I read to them. We came across one in Silas Marner (and I wish I could remember which it was – may have to re-read one of these days). They challenged me, we looked it up in the dictionary, and the sentence there was…. Ta da! from Silas Marner.
Great point on reading a lot as a kid. In my opinion, linguistic creativity is born precisely out of being impressed (as I implied in the post), and for various reasons this is far more likely in childhood. Thanks for your comment 🙂
Vocabulary is very important when you write poetry. The words get a very special role when used in poems because each word, well chosen, brings in a hidden meaning, implying thoughts and feelings not explicitly stated. It becomes a minimalist communication, almost a game when the poet dares the reader to fathom the deepest meaning attached to the word used.
In fiction, it all depends if it is primarily emotionally or intellectually oriented. I have read emotionally oriented fiction (most of Chris’s) that was almost poetry and I loved every word well chosen to convey an image or a feeling. The kind of fiction I write is mostly intellectual and my main aim is to find the utmost clarity when I choose a word, so the thought gets across as completely as I can manage. In all cases, vocabulary is as important as the building material used by a carpenter (I am doing that right now) – if you don’t have the right tools or material, you produce a substandard product.
I really like your linking between poetry and vocabulary. There are some intriguing repercussions indeed, having to do with the way most readers see neat separations between poetry and prose, whereas they’re actually part of a large continuum.
I also like your reference to emotional vs intellectual (perhaps another continuum), as they both highlight, maybe for different reasons, the importance of vocabulary and – most crucially – the importance of suitable vocabulary. Thanks for your comment!
Igor here. Yes, I now have a WordPress account. And, yes, it’s called Heraclitoris (suits my humour well: philosophy and a bit of fun).
I agree with you. Having nothing to say is far worse than having a limited vocabulary. Literary masterpieces were written with limited vocabularies: The old man and the sea (E. Hemingway), Blood meridian (C. McCarthy), etc. Willingly limiting one’s lexicon might even be a way to enhance one’s creativity. In sum: a large dictionary memorized means nothing, as literature is not only made of human tongue, but also of literary language (narrative, for example, which it shares with drama, cinema, radio plays, and so on). To have a limited matrix in literary language is the real bummer: shows a writer knows not its very craft. In order to learn it: play. Simple playfulness, experimenting with possibilities — equipped with self-criticism — should suffice to train a writer in the language of literature (beyond human language).
First of all, masterful user name! 😀
As for the crux of the matter, I’m particularly intrigued by your reference to willingly limiting vocabulary. Recently I’ve been experimenting with such creative devices – programming in only 48K or limiting myself to 36 photos per occasion without looking at the LCD display (to simulate film).
I wonder, however, how doing that for vocabulary would work in practice. I don’t have the answer at the moment, but I’m intrigued!
It could work so many ways, too, not just vocabulary. One could write without using a certain figure of speech, or without using a certain word class (adjectives, for example). A literature professor I had, wrote a novel without conjugating a single verb, all were in infinitive forms. Marvellous endeavour (Portuguese language helped a bit, since it has a “personal infinitive”, which is a sort of non-conjugated conjugation). Again, I invite you not to limit yourself to the human languages. Think constraining the literary language: never using, say, descriptions. Or never using commas. Or dots, thus writing a single huge sentence. Never (or only) writing dialogue. Having no more (or no less) than, say, three characters. Possibilities are endless. Constraining is a great way to challenge (and enhance) one’s creativity.