Cowboy Confessional

Moby Dick is proof that writers should not own a thesaurus. Hell, I had to look up “circumambulate.”

Precise writing is powerful.  Precise word use makes for precise writing.  But precision means choosing the right word for the audience.  Melville apparently tried to prove intellectual depth through employing every arcane word he could identify.  In the process he turned a good story into mucky reading for the average book buyer.

A thesaurus is a good tool (and I highly recommend paying the bribe required by reference.com to use their dictionary and thesaurus without the aggravating advertising).  Refernce.com allows you to bounce back and forth between the dictionary and thesaurus without losing the word in question, and they have a rich set of dictionaries and synonyms available.

The goal for a writer is to chose the best word.  “Best” is not entirely subjective.  Words convey specific meanings, have emotional connotations, and even lend poetic verve to a sentence.

Take for example a line from a Tom Wait’s song.  The line reads “He’s spillin’ whiskey every night.”  Now grab your thesaurus and substitute alternatives for the word spill (ignoring the enhancement of the dropped ‘g’).  Nothing else works quite as well, despite spillin’ being a simple word.

The lesson is to think about the precision of a word.  Does it make the most sense from a definition standpoint?  Does it convey the right emotion?  Or will it make you look like “the liquor soon mounted into your head” (borrowing a good bad example from Melville).

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