Use familiar words - Twelve ways to give your words power

100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Use familiar words
Twelve ways to give your words power

Do you know what a mandible is? Your dentist does. She uses that word every day.

So if you are writing a story just for your dentist, use mandible. But if you are writing for everybody else, use the more familiar word, jaw.

A word that your reader doesn’t recognize has no power. If it confuses the reader and sends him or her scurrying for the dictionary, it has broken the reader’s spell.

Familiar words have power. By avoiding very long words, you avoid most of the words that your reader doesn’t know. But you should also replace short words if they are so rare that your reader might not know them.

Even though delegate is longer than depute, it is better. Don’t write sclerous if you can write hardened, and if you have written that something is virescent, please go back and say that it is turning green.

A couple of tips. A word is familiar if it came easily to you but is not part of some specialized knowledge you have, such as a botanical term. A word is unfamiliar if you never heard of it until you found it in the thesaurus or if you haven’t read it at least three times in the past year.