Fall in love with words - Squeeze the most out of FAST - The payoff

Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Fall in love with words
Squeeze the most out of FAST
The payoff

This is the very best way to squeeze the most out of FAST.

Most of the words we use today have a very long history. They’ve twisted and changed and distorted and contorted from one form into another over — sometimes — thousands of years.

Words evolve, and change meaning. Words get stolen from one language and adapted to another. Words get abbreviated, mangled, colloquialized, blended, coined, and invented. And sometimes re-invented.

And their meaning in any given sentence can be changed or determined by the other words that surround them.

Words are great.

And I mean great.

They’re so great, we can come up with better words than “great”!

Fantastic, excellent, cool, tremendous, marvelous, terrific, dynamite, exceptional, dandy, awesome, sublime, glorious, outstanding, remarkable, splendid, peachy, exemplary, wonderful... and probably a hundred more.

Get excited by the possibilities of words and their many different nuances. With your writing, you can pinpoint an idea so clearly, so accurately, that it will physically transfer from the inside of your brain into the mind of another person, exactly as you intended.

Words are your tools. They can help you or hinder you.

Make them your friends.

No. Go beyond that. Fall in love! Notice words, and how they form sentences in other people’s writing. Look for ways to improve your words, and make your ideas clearer.

It’s a love affair that has great rewards.