100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Expand your vocabulary
Nine ways to improve your writing when you’re not writing

Everybody has heard tips for improving vocabulary. Learn a new word in the morning and use it three times before sunset and it’s yours, etc. There are many books that will help you stretch your vocabulary. The best-known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis. Read that book or one like it.

There are websites such as vocabulary.com and lingualift .com if you prefer to work with your vocabulary online. For those on the go, apps such as Vocabulary Builder by Magoosh and Vocab24 by WiFi Study are free and highly rated for improving your vocabulary.

But the most important vocabulary for the writer is not the one that will take in uxorious tomorrow and soubrette the next day. It’s the one he or she already has. For the writer of average intelligence and education, learning new words is much less important than learning to use easily the words he or she already knows.

Think for a minute. How many synonyms can you come up with for the noun plan?

There are program, itinerary, scheme, design, agenda, outline, and blueprint. If you concentrated for a minute, you might have come up with ten words that you already knew. But how many of them would have come easily to mind while you were writing a letter to the boss about your potentially lucrative new . . . uh . . . plan?

The only way to make your vocabulary more accessible is to use it. If you want all those short but interesting words waiting at the front of your brain when you need them, you must move them to the front of your brain before you need them.

Stop to think about other word possibilities when you write, and eventually they will come so quickly that you won’t have to stop.

Pause before you speak. Then insert some of those good but neglected words.

And when you drive home from work at night, pick out an object along the road and see how many synonyms you can think of before you pass it. There’s a house over there. But it’s also a dwelling, an abode, a building, a bungalow, perhaps, or maybe a cottage. It’s a home for somebody, it’s headquarters for a family, and it’s a shelter and a structure, too.