Word Choice, Diction, and Syntax | Writing Tips

hey guys it's shaylyn and i'm here today with another writing video super excited about today's topic today we're going to be talking about word choice and diction when i asked you guys for topics you wanted me to talk about a lot of people said like talk about pros talk about like craft stuff like the technical craft stuff and i love talking about that stuff it's one of my favorite things to talk about and i can't believe i've never i've never done a video on word choice when word choice or diction which just is a fancy way of saying word choice is so important um you can change one word in a sentence to a synonym so a word with the same meaning and it can completely change the impact of the sentence it can even change the meaning so it's really really important to be choosing words thoughtfully with care in a piece of writing there are really two core components there's the story so what happens and there's the form so how you tell it word choice obviously comes down to the form it's how you're going to convey the story in your head in many ways a word is kind of the smallest unit within a piece of writing that has meaning on its own obviously you have letters that make up words a single letter on its own doesn't really hold any comprehensible meaning but a word on its own does hold comprehensible meaning if you see the letter m it doesn't really mean anything to you it's just a letter but if you put it within a word and you hear the word moon or the word mammal or the word mother those all have meanings that conveys a meaning to you that's why words need to be chosen with so much care it's about choosing the words that best convey your story so the first thing to consider with word choice is words that are in the character specific voice and lexicon when you're creating voice and when you're there for choosing words within the voice you want to choose words that are harmonious with your character's lexicon so this is not only considering words that they logically would use so based on their age where's their vocabulary at based on their background where what kind of words would be in their vocabulary but also words that kind of convey their personality i'm going to pepper in some examples over voice over after each point here so we're going to start with this example on character voice so this is from the best bad things by katrina carrasco he is handsome in a rough cut way successful a scotsman someone she might not have lamented a match with if her uncle had kept her pliant and bridled now the thought of marriage and its drudgery makes her squirm her corset bones creak god damn this costume she is weighted with draperies pinned with dead curls forced to sit straight as a stick dressed in her own clothes she could sprawl share wheeler's fancy liquor so the words that i've highlighted here are lamented pliant bridled drudgery pinned and sprawl and i've also specifically highlighted dead curls here because um that's a very specific use of an adjective and i'm not going to change it the rest of them i've changed i haven't changed dead curls because i couldn't really think of a way to change dead i don't know dead is a pretty clear word it's almost impossible to change the meaning there without completely removing the word but i just think that it does really reveal a lot about the character that she's referring to her hair as like dead curls there's some really specific word choice here i really especially want to highlight bridled i think bridled is a triumph of word choice it is the perfect word choice for this character in this situation the implications of bridling a horse reducing her in the context of marriage to the animal who is being broken and tamed and used for a use is really deep and character driven so that is an absolute incredible use of word choice and so in my revised version i have made this much worse so this is not an improvement and i changed all these words that really build the voice into kind of like their more obvious less voicey counterparts so this is what we have here he is handsome in a rough cut way successful a scotsman someone she might not have hated a match with if her uncle had kept her obedient and constrained now the thought of marriage and its struggle makes her squirm her corset bones creak god damn this costume she is weighted with cloth styled with dead curls forced to sit straight as a stick dressed in her own clothes she could drape share wheeler's fancy liquor changing lamented to hated is just a bit more of an obvious word kept her obedient and constrained compared to pliant and bridled pliant and bridled first of all the sound of that is much more interesting it's less obvious word choice and those words just have much more interesting implications compared to obedient and constrained which is more obvious more overt and there's nothing to really read into i changed drudgery to struggle drudgery is definitely a word we don't use too often in our contemporary word choice contemporary lexicon but this is a historical novel and so changing it to struggle removes some of that historical voice i changed draperies to cloth again removed the specificity that builds the historical voice i changed pinned to styled i think that the fact that she's pinned with dead curls to pin to pin down to hold in place to hold in place with something sharp that could be even painful whereas just styled almost sounds quite pleasant and then i changed sprawl to drape i think sprawl has a more active implication of i am taking up space i am sprawling i am breaking out of constraint whereas drape is more inactive you would drape a coat over a chair it's something that you do with something rather than sprawling which is almost rebellious in its implication so just by changing the words essentially to synonyms but words that are synonyms or serve the same purpose in the sentence we've completely changed the character voice the second point is to choose words that fit into the story's tone and atmosphere this is what i call a linguistic ecosystem and it is essentially how you create atmosphere i have an old video on atmosphere and i don't really talk about this because i don't think i had synthesized it into these specific terms yet but i do talk about this in my video called 15 tips for better shorts for writing better short stories or something i'll leave a link to that it's time stamped so you can just scroll to that point if you want but the whole video is pretty great so you should watch the whole thing linguistic ecosystem is a term that i use i think it really effectively explains kind of what i mean by that harmonious use of language just how there are certain plants that do not grow in certain regions it is too cold where it is too hot for that that ecosystem to grow that plant there may be certain words that do not grow in the ecosystem of your story but other words that grow in abundance word choice isn't just about choosing the best word for the specific instance but about choosing words that are in harmony with all of the words around them this is the concept of patterning you know i've talked about patterns in a lot of videos this is a form of patterning this honestly sounds more complicated than it is literally it's just using words that feel like they go together ask yourself how does my story feel like what is its tone what is its atmosphere is it very delicate and soft and dreamy well in that case use words that to you feel very delicate and soft and dreamy when i think i'm writing something very delicate soft dreamy i might use words like lace cotton pollen dandelion you know like these are really soft words they have soft sounds as opposed to something really intense that just wouldn't fit so i didn't create linguistic ecosystems from scratch i just went through a couple of my stories and pulled the linguistic ecosystem i tried making them from scratch but i found that that was kind of pointless this linguistic ecosystem is from a story called how to slaughter in this one i found threads of nature primarily religion animals and also violence so the next one is probably the most intense this is from a story called i am a wolf in wolves clothing the main character of this story is like very intense person and so we're gonna see a very different linguistic ecosystem we see a lot more complex words the how to slaughter one had more like grounded natural words whereas here we're seeing more like complex latin-rooted words words like neurochemical photosynthesis and there's a lot of movement and there's a lot of intensity all right so now i have two points on picking more vivid words we're going to talk about verbs and we're going to talk about nouns we're going to start with verbs you want to improve your word choice start with your verbs you can do so much work for a piece and for your overall writing style just by focusing on choosing stronger verbs verbs are the most active visceral vivid part of a sentence so choosing more interesting verbs more visceral verbs can really really punch up your prose without adding any extra words you keep the same word count so it's not really necessarily going to make it purple or overwrought um it's just going to really lift it up so the key with verbs what you want to think about is defamiliarizing them there are a lot of verbs that are just inherent they're they're exactly what we'd expect for example what does the sun do the sun shines in most cases when you read a sentence about the sun what is the sun doing the sun is shining if you had a sentence like the sun shine through the leaves the verb in that case is very familiar it's not doing anything we could replace it we could say something like the sun pierced through the leaves that one's a bit more intense it's a bit sharper we could say something like the sun laced through the leaves that one's very soft the image is more interesting first of all both of those create different but stronger images the sun shine through the leaves doesn't create very interesting image at least for me because it's so familiar when it comes to verbs i love verbs so much that i actually keep a list of verbs in a note on my phone and whenever i find a good verb that i don't want to forget let's say i'm having a good sifting through a thesaurus session and i find some good verbs and i don't really have a place for all of them in this scene right now i add them to my verb list it's organized alphabetically when i need some good verbs check my verb list highly recommend curating your own verb list so now we're going to look at defamiliarizing some verbs beyond the narrow bar of sand scrub grass dried by the summer grew up an outcrop and above that a scheme of foliage teak trees wrapped in vines and decorated with hibiscus blooms a mangrove tree grew up the bluff and its roots lay in the sand like a pit of hibernating snakes palm trees left shadows shaped like stars on the beach the skull of the tree drifted in the breeze those are pretty weak verbs i kind of lifted up those verbs and turned them all into verbs that are a bit more interesting in this case i tried to turn every single verb into something a bit more interesting so maybe to you it seems like too much maybe it seems like an overcrowding of strange verbs but for the sake of this example i wanted to do them all i did end up leaving one of them just because i couldn't really find a way to make it more original beyond the narrow bar of sand scrub grass brittled by the summer scratched up an outcrop and above that a scheme of foliage teak trees strangled in vines and studded with hibiscus blooms a mangrove tree grew up the bluff and its roots snarled in the sand like a pit of hibernating snakes palm trees stamped shadows shaped like stars on the beach the skull of the tree bobbled in the breeze so the trees being strangled in vines is much more visceral than wrapped in vines decorated with hibiscus blooms seemed a bit out of place it was a bit too intentional for a wild plant so i turned that into studded the roots lying in the sand that verb was a bit inconducive with the simile it says the roots were like a pit of hibernating snakes so instead i said that they snarled and you want to do a similar thing with nouns with nouns i think it's all about specifying your nouns the problem with verbs is when they are familiar the problem with nouns i think is when they are vague so if you have the sentence a plant grew on the windowsill plant is vague you know how many types of plants there are like i'll google it right now scientists now have an answer there are about 391 000 species of plants so when you see those words like plants you want to specify that you could say you know what's type of plant a dracaena grew on the windowsill a ficus grew on the windowsill there are so many types of plants so specify it not only is it a more interesting word dracaena is a way more interesting word than plant but it's also a more interesting image if someone knows what a dracaena looks like they're gonna picture something more specific even if they don't they're going to know that it's a plant from the context the word itself will create more intrigue in the sentence research is definitely your best friend when it comes to nouns i have a research tab open every single time that i write because i'm constantly stopping to research things and a lot of the time is to find more specific nouns you know how many times i have like had something in mind but i didn't know what the word for it was and instead of stopping to describe it i was able to find a really specific word the amount of times that i've been describing a window and been like is there a name for like the bar like the center bar frame of a window i don't know googling parts of a window parts of blank is one of my most common google searches because it helps me find more specific nouns when i identify them in my work and when you use more specific nouns it can also really help add credibility to the subject matter when i was working on my novel honey vinegar it's set in a logging town the main character is not a lager but a lot of people around her are and so i did a lot of research into logging terminology to find specific words i was able to use the diction that was accurate to the main character because she would know these words she's grown up around this and it makes it so much more convincing when you read it and there are all these specific logging terms you go oh maybe the author really like grew up in a logging town or something i didn't we are going to specify some nouns so this is the opening the original paragraph with the vag nouns a bird screeched from inside the trees branches hung over the beach rotting fruit melted in the sand it was only evening but constellations of stars already stung the sky the moon hung over the water here i want to especially specify birds trees and fruit those are all things we could easily specify and constellations of stars i either want to specify that or i want to turn it into just constellations or stars constellations are made of stars and so we shouldn't need to say both this is a vague noun but it's also too embellished so i'm going to embellish it more just because that's what we're talking about but you could also easily make it less embellished if you don't feel that contributes to your piece so here's the revised version a macaw screeched from inside the jungle palm fronds hung over the beach rotting coconuts melted in the sand it was only evening but constellations cassiopeia ursa minor cepheus already stung the sky the moon hung over the ocean i decided to specify them maybe this could imply that the character knows how to navigate where they are by the stars my next tip is to use words that sound like what they mean this is where my verb list is going to come in so much of word choice for me comes down to sound the musicality of the words and how they work within the sentence it's not just about the meaning it's about the sound um you know especially when i'm looking at synonyms of words and i'm trying to pick one a lot of the time i pick the one that i like the sound of the best in this specific context a lot of words their sound reflects the meaning of the word and those are often the strongest ones to use and you'll see this a lot with verbs so i'm gonna go through my verb list and i'm going to list some of the ones that stand out to me because they sound like what they mean bevel bevel has been one of my favorite verbs recently i've been using it in like everything the word bevels in carbonate it's got really short staccato syllables of course it it's coarse when you say it drift the word becomes lighter towards the end like it's drifting off same with diffuse flutter the t is in the middle literally do have a flutterian sound pirouette sift sift is one of my favorite verbs the word it does sift through your teeth as you say it which i think is fun but basically let's just make a point words that sound like what they mean invoke this extra visceral quality to the sentence and so for me sound is so important also even when i'm choosing nouns a lot of the time i will be looking for some good specific nouns let's say i have a sentence where a main character puts on perfumes they might google types of perfume i'll probably pick the perfume that i end up picking based on what it sounds like and how do i like how that sound fits into the sentence what does it evoke how does it fit into the linguistic atmosphere so let's start with this example the clouds zipped across the sky and snapped open storm water twirled over the city so sonically clouds nor rain do these things clouds are large and fluffy and damp and clumsy they don't zip and they don't snap to zip implies speed and to be aerodynamic an arrow would zip a plane would zip a cloud wouldn't zip a board would snap but a cloud wouldn't snap it's not brittle enough i did specify that this was storm water not rain just to be clear it wouldn't twirl twirl is too fun it's too light that is not sonically what it is doing it is doing something actually a lot more vicious bloated and ruptured both sounded more like things a cloud could do and then i went with slash for storm water since it more accurately captured the context of the situation another really important part of word choice is condensing your constructions this is something you guys will be told so much you've probably heard it before especially when it comes to things like adverbs or adjectives but so often you can create a stronger word by condensing multiple words into one so for example a dark brown door you would be better off just finding a material that is dark brown so you could say a mahogany door that's a case where we had two adjectives right we had an adjective and then we had an adjective modifying the adjective because it was brown and it was dark brown so just smush them into one not only is mahogany a more interesting word but it's also fewer words and in general fewer words less the words you have shine more the more you can pair back the excess the more those really well chosen words that you have will be able to shine i think of this one because this is an example from one of my line editing videos and i i still thought of it there was a sentence that was in the line editing that someone had submitted it was like the stars shone playfully and so what we did in that video was we took sean playfully and we condensed it into one verb the verb we ended up picking was wink because wink is playful and so if the stars are winking they're shining playfully however condensing instructions also means cutting basically the padding you know the weasel words words that don't add anything those extra words like very or that or just or only if you watch my line editing video and i might even have a second one up by now that's a really big focus of those videos is just basically just cutting the excess words those strong words that you've now put in so much work into choosing well those verbs the specific nouns they'll be able to shine more i do want to be clear there's nothing wrong with having adjectives or adverbs i use them all the time in my work the reason you'll often be told to avoid them is because they're often not used well if you can condense it into a single stronger word then the sentence will probably be better off that way when you do choose to use an adverb or an adjective it has a lot more impact it's well earned you really only want to use adverbs or adjectives that add a necessary modifier to the sentence so let's look at condensing constructions so this is our initial construction here she slips into the dress and cinches the waistband tight around her hips it's a bit too small for her she runs her hands over the satin so let's edit this she slips into the dress and cinches the waistband and we're gonna cut tight around her hips because the waistband is around your hips to cinch is to pull tight so it's redundant to tell us about those things it's a bit too small for her we don't need a bit we could just say it's too small of course for her she's the one wearing it so we could just say it's too small and then she runs her hands over the satin um if you're touching something it's probably with your hands so i'm just gonna change that to a singular verb so we've condensed this to she slips into the dress and cinches the waistband it's too small she traces the satin another thing you can consider when it comes to word choice is choosing words that have the proper weight sometimes you use words that are say too intense at moments where it's not warranted or maybe are too light or too fun at moments that are very serious this can either cause melodrama because you're using words that are too heavy too intense or it can cause awkward dissonance between the subject matter and the word choice if you're describing something very intense but you use a very fun light playful diction unless you're doing that intentionally you know to reveal something important about the character you're creating this really weird dissonance where the word choice is not in harmony with the subject matter in general words that feel heavier are going to be abstract words so words that don't have a physical form words that are concepts or emotions you know emotion words like angry happy sad joyful etc etc concepts you know like beauty or justice or conscience you know these are very heavy words now let's look at word weight the apple is ripe and full of lifeblood she rips out a chunk of the flesh and its nectar strangles down her throat and i just want to have a note that flesh is really only a melodramatic and too heavy here in the context of so many other heavy words the flesh of a fruit is the technical term so it would be fine if the words surrounding it were a bit toned down now when i read this i ask is this a life-saving apple is this like the original sin is she dying of hunger because these words are all very heavy so they imply an extremely heavy context if she is literally just eating an apple in her kitchen these words are too heavy and they are an example of purple prose this is how purple prose tends to happen so let's edit this these are the changes that i made and i rewrote it too the apple is ripe she bites a chunk out of the flesh and juice drips down her throat this is much simpler obviously it's not very interesting writing but it's also not a very interesting situation but the words here for the context are more appropriate but the reverse can also happen we can also have words that are not heavy enough for the context so here's an example of that she pulls through the sand fingers sore and nails scuffed sunburn tans her face and thirst dries her throat if she doesn't keep moving forward forward she will lie in the sand and nap so whatever is happening here it is not fun but why such mild language pulls through the sands pretty weak fingers are just sore nails are just scuffed sunburn is just tanning her face not doesn't even seem that bad she's just getting a tan moving is a very vague word and she will lie in the sand and nap that actually sounds quite nice so let's revise that to match the more intense situation it seems that she is lost in the desert she claws through the sand fingers bleeding and nails cracked sunburn rashes her face and thirst sears her throat if she doesn't keep fighting forward forward she will collapse in the sand and wilt which leads to the next point which is about abstract versus concrete language i have talked about this in past videos so i'm not gonna go super in depth here if you want more information on abstract versus concrete language as well as specificity i do have a whole video on specificity which is literally about specificity and concrete versus abstract language but when you're choosing your diction you do want to look for concrete words and favor them over abstract words so abstract words are just words that don't have a physical form like i just mentioned concrete words are words that do have a physical form or can be perceived with the set with the senses when i say lamp or tree or desk you know what these things are they have a physical form you know what to picture but going back to those abstract words when i say conscience or justice or beauty who knows what you picture those words are much heavier but they're also abstract especially when you're writing descriptively you do want to avoid abstract words because they don't actually have any inherent descriptive value so here we have an example using abstract language the air smelled of contentment and the summers of her childhood contentment is an abstract word um that's just an emotion and the summers of her childhood we actually don't know anything about her childhood maybe we do in the context of the story but i don't know we don't know what that smells like everyone's childhood is going to be associated with different smells maybe the summers of your childhood aren't even conducive to contentment maybe she had a very traumatic childhood and so this is a contradictory statement the air smelled like willow pollen and cotton candy sweet and mingling with salt just like it had when her grandmother took her to the pier each summer as our final point i wanted to talk about using resources there is absolutely nothing wrong with using resources for your word choice in fact i'd recommend it i'd highly recommend using a thesaurus i have a thesaurus and a reverse dictionary open every single time that i draft it's a great way to expand your vocabulary and also just remind you of words that maybe aren't the first one that came to mind it is not a cheat in any way in fact it takes a lot of practice and skill to use as a source effectively and pick the right synonyms so don't feel afraid of using a thesaurus but a word of warning because they do need to be used smartly if when you use a thesaurus you lean towards words that you aren't familiar with and then you put them into your work without double checking their meaning you can run into issues so as a little anecdote i had a ta in a sociology class once who was warning us about this because a friend of hers had been writing a paper and in the paper there was a sentence where she had said like he is manipulative but she felt she'd already used the word manipulative too many times so she plugged it into a thesaurus and one of the results that came up was gerrymandering gerrymandering comes up in a thesaurus when you search manipulative because it is a form of political manipulation but it does not make any sense in the context of the sentence and so she put it in the paper and it didn't make any sense that's what happens when you use a thesaurus take words that you don't know don't double check what they mean so be very careful when you're using one if you're going to use words you've never heard of before just do that extra little bit of research to make sure it makes sense but they are a great tool definitely don't be afraid of using tools like i said research is great i literally google things constantly in order to find those specific details it's like a constant necessary part of my writing process i don't have just this infinite well of specific details that exist in my brain i'm not that worldly i've gotta look them up and there's nothing wrong with that in fact the practice comes from knowing when to look up specific details and how to choose ones that will benefit your piece not just having omniscient knowledge of every single thing on earth that you can use to populate your writing with good word choice so that is all for this video on word choice i do have a few more videos related to this topic that i will leave in the description thank you so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video bye [Music] you

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 47,571

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, word choice, diction, syntax, line editing, prose, how to write better prose, description, how to write description, how to line edit

Id: jKoOxrcVnHM

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021