Culture & Personal & Productivity & Writing 09 Sep 2006 04:10 pm
There's a reason dictionaries exist
When I'm writing, I'm very conscientious of the words of I'm using. Generally, I choose each word specifically for a reason. As I'm taking online courses, most of the work is written, which is good for me. I don't have to drive to class 3 days a week and sit and be bored out of my tree. It's a lot more efficient to sit at home and do the reading and writing all at once. 3 hours of work condensed into 1.
Anyway, I read other people's work sometimes — it's encouraged — and sometimes I wonder if people know what the words they're using actually mean. In OS X, there's a little dictionary built-in. If I don't know all of the subtleties behind a given word, I won't use it, or I'll look it up just to be sure. And then I'll re-work the sentence or paragraph until I like it. (Blog entries excluded sometimes. 
) There are similar tools for Windows. And about a million Internet dictionaries on top of that.
My writing is a lot like my speaking. I've been told in the past that I speak "like a book" — whatever that means. I've always taken it as a compliment because I choose my words carefully both in speech and writing, and I strive to have my writing be as much "like me" as possible. I try to be authentic.
But when you read papers — even at the college level — it becomes apparent that people cannot write nearly as coherently as they can usually speak. They use words that they wouldn't if they were talking. This is bad because it's usually painfully obvious. It's okay to be plain-spoken. You don't need to have a Shakespearean vocabulary to get your point across; no one's going to look down on you for not using flowerly language. Yeah you might not be able to be a "professional writer" — whatever that means these days — but you won't look dumb, either.
This begs the question… why not simply speak your mind on something and then transcribe what you've said? It's real, it's usually not bad, and it's probably quicker than trying to bridge that disconnect between speech and written communication that seems to exist in some people — and it'll sound genuine AND intelligent.
Really, it's just better.
on 09 Sep 2006 at 8:26 pm 1.Anonymous said …
mainly because spoken and written english generally have different grammar? (ie, almost anything goes in spoken english, but there are at least a handful of rules that you can't really break in written english.)
on 19 Sep 2006 at 1:43 am 2.Durf said …
I teach translation to a bunch of non-native speakers of English, which means most of what I teach is English composition. A big challenge for them is getting over the idea that complicated sentences express big ideas better. I'm always telling them of the scene in A River Runs Through It where the dad looks over the essay his home-schooled son wrote and says "Very good. Now make it half as long."
In spoken language we want to get the point across quickly, and we go with the compact phrases that contain everything we want to express. We've got lots of practice doing that. Nobody has as much practice writing as he does speaking a language, though.