This quote appeared on my Google homepage today...
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. - Stephen King
I love it.
Since joining the higher education world over a year ago, I find myself in meetings where people try and make themselves sound so smart by using a million big words and it just worsens their case.
Reminds me of that Friends episode where Joey wants to sound smart when writing a letter of recommendation to an adoption agency considering Monica and Chandler as adoptive parents. Joey looks every word he plans to use up in a thesaurus and the letter ends up completely jumbled. The agency receives the letter and accepts Monica and Chandler because they think a child wrote the letter! Too funny.
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"Never ever stop writing. Write something everyday. Trust me on this." ~John Lofflin
2 comments:
Told the feature writing class last Friday to burn their thesauruses. The difficult thing for writers is to have the confidence to believe in themselves, to believe their words are good enough. It's not the size of the word or the complexity of the word or the elegance of the word, it's the accuracy of the word which matters. Is this the perfect word for this spot? is the only valid question. -- Lofflin
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