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Prose is an intimate exchange between writer and reader. Always think about your reader; hold your audience
are strangers, or as if they are beneath you.
The best children’s book authors are masters of pitch, because they need to write lines that appeal simultaneously to those equally fearsome critics—children and their easily bored parents.
Pompous phrasing often serves no purpose other than to puff up the speaker.
When we learn to write English papers in high school we are often rewarded for big words. Unfortunately, these habits only get worse in Ph.D. programs, which seem to breed abstract language like cultures in a Petri dish. The best academic writers impress us not just with their scholarship, but with their ability to find the right pitch—
No attorney goes home and says at the dinner table, “Please pass the green beans. Said green beans are excellent.” So why does she write contracts and letters that sound so unnatural?
Jargon can reflect institutions more than it does the real humans they serve. Even if it gets to the mercenary point, “monetizing” is no better than “finding a way to make money.” If you want to write eloquently as a professional, you need to do it with good words. Universal words.
Every word in that sentence is a pearl, and every word helps set a pitch that is at once humble and eloquent.
It’s true that nouns name people, places, and things-you-can-taste-touch-see-smell-or-hear. But a noun can also name intangible things, like concepts, emotions, or ideas. Math is a noun; so are melancholy and myth.
“simply a word that does nouny things; it is the kind of word that comes after an article, can have an ’s stuck onto it, and so on.”
Where grammarians see eight parts of speech, linguists see four major “word classes” (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and a few minors (including pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions). As for interjections—well, we’ll take those up later.
A common noun refers generically to people, places, or things. It might be vague or it might be specific, but it is always written in lowercase letters (bus, day, moon, snow, yogurt, phantasms, dervishes). It may also be abstract (glimpses, twilight).
A proper noun is more specific, in that it refers to one and only one person, place, or thing. It might name an individual (Paul Theroux), a geographical place (Turkey, Iskenderun, Antioch), or a particular train line (7:20 Express to Latakia). Proper nouns are written with initial capital letters (and when they are brand names they might even contain interior capital letters, as in iPhone and YouTube).
In compound nouns, words double up...
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whole that is more than the sum of its parts. They can be made of common nouns (bus ride), proper nouns (Central Anatolia), or both (Galatia highlands). They can be “open compounds” (acid trip) or closed ones (daylight, slipstream). Compounding has been common throughout the history of English, but writers and their editors don’t always agree on when and whether to splice words together. (Theroux went with backseat, which is now Webster’s preferr...
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The writers among us want to say as much as we can in as few words as possible, so we find specific, revealing nouns (mother, cardiologist, kayaker). Nouns like soccer mom, mother hen, or matron say even more—because they give clues about age and attitude.
The best nouns are concrete rather than abstract, specific rather than general.
They are also ev...
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Choosing the right noun means exploring the layers of a word. First, it must precisely render an image: pick bungalow if you’re describing a one-story house with a low-pitched roof. Second, your noun must be evocative, its connotations conjuring a realm of emotion or sensation: stay with bungalow (or perhaps choose cottage) if you’re capturing coziness, a homey atmosphere. Finally, your noun must be apt—its associations, its links to other words and ideas, must complement your meaning. Are the occupants a bunch of frat boys? Then crash pad might work better.
NOUNS CAN BE PLAYFUL as well as precise.
SOMETIMES NOUNS PINWHEEL AROUND a subject, giving it a multicolored vitality.
Descriptions require powerhouse nouns. Good character sketches focus on concrete details,
images give us a clear snapshot
the perfectly pitched metaphors
make the portrait...
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This is what great character descriptions do: they give us precise information as well as ideas, physical traits as well as psychological ones, and sometimes the psychological embedded in the physical.
Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Covetousness, and Sloth.
Lurking in more contemporary texts are the seven deadly sins committed with nouns: Sloth, Fog, Gluttony, Gobbledygook, Jargon, Pride, and Euphemism. We can simplify that list into five broad categories: Imprecision, Abstraction, Groupspeak, Pretense, and Euphemism.
If you can’t be bothered to look up a word in a dictionary, pick up a thesaurus, or spend time mulling the perfect word, you are not a prose stylist.
Writerly “sloth” means grabbing the closest shopworn words without a glimmer of guilt, or creating ugly nouns out of other nouns, verbs, or even inelegant suffixes. “Fog” can be translated as “terminal vagueness.” And “gluttony” means that you load up on empty verbal calories instead of insisting on
linguistic flavor and ...
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Remember, concrete nouns are the stuff of precise images a...
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writers sometimes forget that the primary role of nouns is to paint a clear picture. Instead, they pile up vague nouns
Lazy writers leave us clueless as to the individual nature of the people, places, things, or ideas they are writing about.
Clichés—trite phrases blanched of meaning by overuse—...
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Whoever uttered “It’s raining cats and dogs” for the first time found a catchy way to convey anarchy in the sky. Shakespeare’s green-eyed jealousy must have been brilliant the first time it was uttered in the Globe, but “green with envy” has gone around the Anglophone globe so many times it’s lost all color. In today’s magazines (Wired being...
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Watch out for the mindless slapping together of prefixes on prefixes, suffixes on suffixes—don’t create clunkers like disintermediation, decentralization, effectualization, finalization, scrutinization, and that horrid replacement for “use,” utilization. Enough with the suffix cut-and-paste acts.
Don’t be lazy. Work to find the precise concrete noun.
Abstraction often rises from a kind of gluttony: the word gourmand’s urge to use five words where one would do. Gluttons yammer about “adverse climatic conditions” instead of calling bad weather just that; rain is rain, not “precipitation activity” or “a thunderstorm probability situation.”
Abstractions like condition, precipitation, and phenomenon are setups. Beware of Greek- and Latin-based words, especially those ending in -ion. Don’t be tempted to prettify a blunt noun like “a drunk” with a staggering noun phrase like “a person in an intoxicated condition.” Other words that lead to waterlogged phrases include case, character, degree, element, instance, kind, nature, and persuasion.
Sometimes we load up on so many nouns that we end up with writing that is all empty carbohydrates—just Wonder Bread.
Lean words focus a sentence on its drama and give us the chance for cleaner rhythms.
Lawyers’ terms like plaintiff, ex parte, hearsay, felony, prima facie, and habeas corpus are, indeed, precise. But what about all those aforesaids, hereofs, and hereinafters? That’s not just jargon. It’s junk. Legalese.
the doctors with “bedside manner” know that a gift for the vernacular helps them communicate with patients—and write memorably about their field.
If you’re not sure which words will get you labeled “pretentious,” check out Pompous Ass Words, a Web site dedicated to identifying words that will make you sound like a pompous ass.
euphemisms don’t make for powerful prose.
Poignancy comes when writers cut to the unvarnished truth. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,”
President George W. Bush preferred “weapons of mass destruction.”
We use this commonly now.
Such euphemism is merely a cowardly attempt by bosses to pass the buck in the firing process, a code way of saying “Blame the organization, not me!”
Nouns give shape to ideas, heft to sentences. It’s worth taking the time to get them right. It may seem old-fashioned, or just tedious, to work with a dictionary and a thesaurus at your side, but this is part of the practice of writing. Working with word books strengthens our imaginative muscles, and in turn strengthens our own mental thesauruses, our ability to call up precise words.
