> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.
Disagree.
When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence.
And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader. Check out the often reposted article about Webster's 1913 dictionary. Also this is exactly the purpose of the thesaurus. So yes, if done right, you ARE "saying more than you actually are."
> The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:
>> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence."
"mercurial" does the trick in the quoted example, does Paul have a patch?
Fwiw Stephen King in "On Writing" also says to not use a thesaurus and just use the words you already naturally know how to use. He follows on saying your vocabulary will naturally expand as you read more.
I agree with King on that. A thesaurus is great for finding words you know but don’t use often. Learning new words from it… you’re usually missing important nuance.
King is right about that. If you want to become a better writer, you need to read more good books with high quality prose and stop reading garbage. The thesaurus, while sometimes useful, can become a crutch. Stylistically the great writers will rub off on you if you read them carefully.
John McPhee takes a different approach. Whilst he cautions against over-reliance on the thesaurus, he's a full-throated advocate of a good dictionary:
In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary. Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line—how each listed word differs from all the others.
The first sentence is about the writer; the second about the reader.
If writers aren't learning new words, then readers can't learn from them. When do writers learn new words? From reading! Who writes what the writer reads? Writers.
King seems to be saying "the best way to discover new words is through the labor and chance of picking up the right books and finding some words you had not read before". So all words that can ever be useful have already been written or will be invented by fiction writers, and it is up to you to read a variety of styles and types of fiction rather than the compendium on your shelf. I find this notion silly.
The answer of course is a blend. If someone is leaning on a thesaurus to make bad writing good, there will be a problem, too.
There's a huge potential collection of words you can use. But there's also the words in the current zeitgeist that will be meaningful to your readers.
The only way you can learn these words and give them a proper weighting of "usefulness" and understand their fundamental nature is to read. Yes, you can get definitions and similar words from tomes, and even examples of usage, but you don't really understand the connotations or colloquial uses until you have seen other people use them in full context.
Of course, there are times when one might want to dredge up an infrequently used word, coin a new one, or transport something from current spoken vernacular onto the page. This should be a tiny fraction of where our chosen words come from, though. Reading is the tool to build usable vocabulary, even if it isn't fetch.
I am sure this is out of context, but I regularly use a thesaurus to find names for patterns in my code/design/architecture. Applies to class names, variables, even functions.
I don't think King was saying "never use a thesaurus", he was just pointing out that relying on it too much is not a good way to develop as a writer. The way you do that is by reading great books.
I often use thesaurus to translate complex words into simpler ones, it really does improve the overall writing especially if you are biased towards redundant complexity ...
That's it, it'll depend entirely on the context. Maybe if you're selling something you should write like you talk, or if you're posting comments / opinions on an orange/brown/grey website, but if you're writing "A History of Ancient Britain", it's not exactly you'd talk to your friends about; it's a book, it's to educate and to entertain. Do you talk to your friends to educate and/or entertain? I mean the latter, sure, but people even change how they talk when they are entertaining someone else, so. idk.
Agree. Fancy' words can add flavor to the writing and help avoid repetition, and also are more precise. If you are writing warning labels or instructions, then maybe simpler is better. But otherwise, I don't think it is a problem..
As a reader I would prefer the writer not repeat themselves and write less, rather than try to find some fancy way of not “sounding” repetitive, but in reality finding yet another way of repeating. I prefer actual repetition to that.
More precise words aren’t always better either. Having someone easily grasp what you are saying works much better for conveying information.
Complicated writing is lazy writing.
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
And to make a point that perhaps is restating yours, or overlaps with yours, I think some good writing is "dense" the way that certain foods are calorie dense.
You can intentionally write in a way that's different from your natural voice if your goal is, say, information density, or expressiveness that conveys personality or that makes the experience of reading more enjoyable, or to allow writing to shimmer with all of its contextual entanglements.
Of course people can attempt to do this and make a reading experience worse, and I think writing how you talk can be a helpful rule of thumb for certain use cases.
> When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences.
All other things being equal, I think this is only true because you can reread them at will and puzzle over them until you think you know what the author was trying to say.
Sometimes there's value in that. A good writer knows how to mix up the pacing of their prose, to organically guide the reader into engaging more fully with the parts that communicate complex ideas while the connective tissue disappears effortlessly into the background. But in the hands of a less skilled writer complex language is usually worse on balance: they don't understand that prose should always be economical, that less is almost always more, and many really do suffer from "the false impression that [they are] saying more than [they] actually are." Whether they're writing flowery romance fiction or technical manuals, they get high on their own supply without considering that writing is first and foremost a tool to convey meaning.
The "mercurial Spaniard" bit seems fine out of context. However, in context it had better be clear who that person actually is.
I speak as I speak and write as I write. There need be no competition between the two. What Graham is doing here is reducing two very different media to one.
I love the rich complexity of language you can find in any book by Gene Wolfe. Much of how he writes allows him to communicate two truths in one thick sentence or leave us puzzling over a philosophy. I'd never expect or insist Wolfe to speak as he wrote. It would be a crime to his works and a crime to many others'.
> And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance
The vast majority of time the point of "fancy words" are for the author to display to the audience that they know the fancy words.
Unless you really are genuinely talented at language and word choice, it often comes across as a transparent attempt to impress other people and often jars the reader out of the text.
For whom is PG writing here? For sharp minds who can be encouraged and eventually trusted to use nuanced words correctly, or for mediocre minds that will never do so? And if the latter, why are we discussing this article?
There is something exhausting about that example sentence.
Yes, different words embed different meanings. For instance, it's clear to me what Paul means by "fancy" and "complex." The author William Zinsser makes both points: choose great words and write like you speak.
But I agree that somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, there's a time and place for the word 'mercurial.'
And if you wanted to attribute that sentiment to some aspect of his character and/or nationality?
I can perfectly well imagine saying out loud, in conversation or in a spoken presentation, something like "Being the mercurial Spaniard that he was, Picasso said 'After Altamira, all is decadence'".
I don't think there's anything wrong with the vocabulary choices here, but there is a kind of journalistic writing style which favors brevity, probably originally because you're writing to a column inch count, and it drives writers to try to convey those extra connotations in fewer words. An editor will look at my wordy sentence, tell me to get rid of the throatclearing and filler words and reduce it to "The mercurial Spaniard said..." - and they may well be right.
I would probably just omit the "mercurial Spaniard" part, which feels like fluff to me. The statement "After Altamira, all is decadence" is interesting enough that it can stand on its own without the author needing to dress it up any further or attribute it to some part of Picasso's character or nationality. Let the reader decide whether Picasso is being mercurial or how relevant it is that he is Spanish.
Or if it really is important to highlight those two attributes (it's hard to say from this single sentence), then I would probably expand it out a bit to similar to what you have done.
Yes, context matters. Presumably, one is raising the Picasso quote as part of attempting to make some sort of point. Perhaps, as part of that point, one might want to provide context for why this particular comment from Picasso is relevant to the argument.
Communication is not the recitation of mere facts: "Picasso said 'after Altamira, all is decadence.' The ratio of the diameter and circumference of a circle is pi.".
Nor are we like the Tamarians of Star Trek, where mere cultural references have deeply shared denotative meaning. "Picasso, commenting on decadence after Altamira. Shaka, when the walls fell.".
We use other words around these things we say to express the thoughts in our head and try to replicate them in someone else's.
For what it's worth, here's the actual paragraph from A History of Ancient Britain in whose context this sentence was originally written:
The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders - giants' shoulders - that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all is decadence'.
I mean, sure, this is probably not a great use of the word 'mercurial'. Maybe the author thought that Picasso's volatile moods mean the fact that he said something so profound on such a subject lends the quote some particular poignancy? Personally, the idea that a person of a mercurial temperament might dismiss the entire arc of Western art as pointlessly indulgent seems totally in character. I suspect Byron probably said all of literature after Aristotle was repetition during one of his moods, too. So probably not the author's finest turn of phrase, for sure.
Yes I think that "mercurial" is completely unnecessary in this context, and the author probably just added it because he liked the way it sounded.
Seeing the sentence in context I like it even less. The author is apparently trying to make the point that the work of Picasso and other master painters stands on the "giant" shoulders of Paleolithic cave artists. But he doesn't give much justification other than some quote from Picasso which very well may have been made tongue-in-cheek (and doesn't really support the argument in the first place), and I guess also pointing out the fact that Altamira and Picasso are both in/from Spain.
As I said above if the goal is to make a point, then I think it is worth expanding and firming up the argument. What was Picasso's relationship to Altamira? What influence did it have on his work? Are there ideas and techniques used in Paleolithic cave paintings that Picasso also used? How about other "later masters" that he references?
Possibly the author does go into more detail in subsequent paragraphs on the impact of these cave paintings on future painters - I don't know. But based on the quote above it all feels a bit hand-wavey to me. Or like Graham warns about:
> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.
> attribute that sentiment [mercurial] to some aspect of his character and/or nationality?
traditionally in the English speaking world, Spaniards would in general be described as mercurial (at least in the sense of being driven by passion) so saying "mercurial Spaniard" is more confusing than just saying Spaniard.
The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”
> And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader.
Which can be bad when you want your audience to understand you without significant effort. Reading a novel, a reader may be willing, or excited even, to expend effort to get all the nuances and context. But if you’re writing to communicate an idea, you have to match the expectations of your audience, and your audience may have a fixed effort budget to spend on your writing. Most people know this deal, which is why I think using big words is looked down on as self-absorbed or conceited.
I think similarly about code one-liners: they are super hard for another programmer to read, and not everyone has time for that. So they tend to come off as a kind of elitist bragging if not done carefully.
> The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”
That's even worse. It does nothing to fix the "nobody talks like this" problem if you care about that, and it's as awkward as replacing, I dunno, "He picked up a vermilion coat" with "He picked up a coat the red-orange of mercury sulfide pigment."
If you were writing a technical document, then you'd chop out the whole epithet and just say "Picasso." But that sentence clearly isn't from a technical document, but from a piece where a poetic turn of phrase is more appropriate.
These second order words convey the precise meaning. They exist for a reason.
Authors ought have the responsibility to think through their message and intent and are free to use the most precise words to convey their thoughts. These words stand justified; for expressing delicate emotions you need their help.
P.S. I had to lookup "decadence" I could guess the meaning. It was worth the effort.
Disagree.
When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence.
And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader. Check out the often reposted article about Webster's 1913 dictionary. Also this is exactly the purpose of the thesaurus. So yes, if done right, you ARE "saying more than you actually are."
> The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:
>> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence."
"mercurial" does the trick in the quoted example, does Paul have a patch?