Karen GoatKeeper's Blog - Posts Tagged "learning-new-languages"
Learning New Languages
People think learning a new language is speaking a foreign language like Spanish or French. That new language can be in English.
Lately every new book idea I tackle is requiring me to learn a new language.
The road rally book introduced me to the road rally language of stages and car terms.
The botany monster is really making me work at a new language. A plant is hirsute or glabrous. It has tuberous roots or corms or taproots. The flowers have perianths, corollas, sepals, superior ovaries, some or none of these.
Why bother to learn a new language to write a book? Most of the readers won't know the language and it will only confuse them.
But that is exactly how you are spotted as a fraud by those readers who do know or have a dictionary at hand. It makes your book sound better.
What about all those readers who don't know? This is where your writing skills are important. You use the terms correctly working in a definition so deftly the reader never notices the new addition to their vocabulary.
If you get really good at this, you even stop sounding too professorial as these terms roll onto your book pages and off to the readers.
Lately every new book idea I tackle is requiring me to learn a new language.
The road rally book introduced me to the road rally language of stages and car terms.
The botany monster is really making me work at a new language. A plant is hirsute or glabrous. It has tuberous roots or corms or taproots. The flowers have perianths, corollas, sepals, superior ovaries, some or none of these.
Why bother to learn a new language to write a book? Most of the readers won't know the language and it will only confuse them.
But that is exactly how you are spotted as a fraud by those readers who do know or have a dictionary at hand. It makes your book sound better.
What about all those readers who don't know? This is where your writing skills are important. You use the terms correctly working in a definition so deftly the reader never notices the new addition to their vocabulary.
If you get really good at this, you even stop sounding too professorial as these terms roll onto your book pages and off to the readers.
