A. LaFaye's Blog: Word Wanderings Rest Stop - Posts Tagged "revising"

Besides having prefixes that sound like the nicknames of twins--"precise" and "concise" are excellent writing tools once you learn how to wield them. Until then, they're often red letters in the margins of your work with comments like "Can you be more precise here? " or "Is this as concisely written as it could be?"

Or perhaps that just me.

Being precise and concise are cornerstones of good writing --saying just the right thing in the least amount of words possible is an excellent writing goal in most quarters. Interestingly enough, both words are drawn from a Latin word being "to cut" and we all know how easy it is to "cut back" our own writing. Right?

Well, here are two approaches that could work for you, but I'm of the opinion that there are no hard and fast rules for writing. It's all a matter of finding what works for the type of writer you are, but that may just bw because every rule that starts, "To be a real writer, you must..." ends with something I don't do.

So, here's some advice from an "unreal" writer who has a good deal of fun with word play.

Writing everything we want to say, then cutting back--the pruning approach--works for some. For more on doing a "Poetic Weed" please take a look at my blog on the subject, or wing it!

For this entry, I'm going to focus on "the pre" of precision and look at ways you can learn to increase you precision and brevity before you even start writing.

When you study the writing of others and conscientiously explore language, you sharpen your word smithing tools.

Precision requires knowing lots of words. For instance, what's the name of the groove between the nose and the upper lip? The philtrum. What's the difference between cleaning, mucking, and sluicing a gutter? Why does the difference matter as a writer?

My answer to question to two is: connotation, specificity, and sound.

"Cleaning" suggests a crispness and a sanitary goal with a spic and span result and has a clipped opening and a soft, elongated ending, in terms of sound.

"mucking" suggests sloppy, dirty, work to remove something disgusting, but with a dingy end result. A mucked out stall rarely looks pristine, where as a cleaned stall should. It also has a mmm of a beginning and "uck" in the middle and a drawn out end for musicality that reflects the messy, hard, ongoing work involved.

"sluicing," one of my favorite words, is quite active and organic and requires a lot of water pressure on your gutters and will probably make a living mess out of everything else, if you use this method. The sound quality is quite slurry with a c kicker in the middle.

Learning new words can be done by reading the dictionary--one of the reasons I love the print version. You can't easily happen upon a new word when looking it up on learnanewword.com (not a real site), but you can stumble upon a few beauts wondering through the old OED. That's how I learned "twit" has been around since about the 13th century and it's the same thing all that time. Not many words can say that.

But new words are best learned in context by reading and that's the best way to internalize being precise and concise, read the work of poets, reporters, fiction writers, and cartoonists you love to see just how they do it. Look up new words. Play with them--their meaning, their nuances, their sound, their application in house maintenance (I word I have yet to learn how to spell without assistance).

So go out there and find some new literary foot soldiers you might put to good use. If you pinpoint a fine precise word, please share it in the comment section. Or if you have a concise way to describe something complicated like an argument that allows us to see it in a new way, do share, please.