A Writer’s Vocabulary
By Kevin Spencer
My grades were always pretty good no
matter the subject, but spelling tests always tripped me up. I was a voracious
reader and would have much rather been learning new words rather than laboring
to learn how to spell the words I already knew. To put it simply, I would
invariably get the word definitions 100 percent correct, but then would
miserably fail the spelling half of the test.
It didn’t help my situation that my
father was a teacher and an assistant principal in the same school system.
After a couple of phone calls, teacher to teacher, I found myself spending a
lot more time in toilsome and tedious labor learning how to spell correctly.
Well, that was the plan. No one could have been happier to see the advent of
“Spell Check” than me. And to this day, I’d much rather learn new words than
spell the ones I know.
But that same handsome mental
glossary can also trip you up. It did me. I found myself often using fifty-cent
words when a dime-size word would work just as well. Showing off with a ten
syllable turn-of-phrase stroked my ego, but made any semblance of flow in my
writing impossible. Eventually, I figured out it was more important how a word
slipped into the sentence—and how the paragraph flowed around it—than how many
syllables it contained.
To sum up: Don’t use a big word when a singularly un-loquacious
and diminutive linguistic expression will satisfactorily accomplish the
contemporary necessity.
(Photo courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Stuart Miles.)
TWEETABLE
I loved reading more than any subject also. I did okay with spelling but I still didn't understand some of the spelling rules that made no sense. I before E except after C. Why have silent letters if you don't pronounce them? Who made these up anyway? Lol Thanks for sharing, Kevin.
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