“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Over at Brandywine Books, author Lars Walker writes about using word choice to convey emotions in fiction, and it reminded me how important it was for all writing, not just fiction. He started by talking about what really good actors do to convey emotions with just their eyes:

Last night I pretended to know something about movies, and talked about the kind of subtle acting you used to see in good films—particularly the kind of acting that’s done with the eyes. The thing about eye acting (if I can call it that) is that it’s a sort of visual subtext. It’s not like in a script, where the directions say, “Rufus goes to the window and looks out.” The eye acting is something the actor himself adds, and it probably hasn’t been explicitly written out in the script.

So how can I claim that there’s an equivalent in fiction writing? If you can’t write it in a script, you can’t write it in a story either, right?

Well, not exactly.

How many times have we heard (and said), “It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it.”

“But that’s about tone of voice and facial expression,” you say. “If you describe those things in a story, it’s not eye acting. It’s stage direction—‘Stop!’ John said commandingly. Or ‘Stop!’ John said with an angry frown. There’s nothing subtle about that.”

Ah, but there are other ways. Chief among these is word selection. Word selection is to writing what eye acting is to film.

Much of the time, I’m inclined to go with the first word that rolls onto the page or screen while I’m writing. And while I’m working on the first draft, that’s fine; the important thing at that point is to get the words out and onto the page.

But when we’re re-writing (and we should do that with almost everything we write), we should begin questioning the words you use. Lars gave a couple of examples of how this worked (so go over and read his post), but let me expand on that with some examples of my own.

For example, I could write that someone “walked into the room.” Or I could replace walked with other words like: stride, stomp, stump, stumble, wander, amble, bounce, prance, barge, crash, waltz, or sashay. Each word conveys the same basic information as walked, that a person entered a room; but each of these alternatives adds another layer of information, both denotative (that is, the specific and direct meaning) and connotative (implied or suggested associations).

I can write that someone said something, or I can instead use murmur, mumble, moan, mutter, blurt, bleat, bark, wail, whisper, hiss, stutter, shriek, or cry. Again, these words have different definitions, and they also convey information about emotional states.

All writing, not just fiction writing, can benefit when we give careful thought to our words. A bit of creativity can go a long way, even in something as prosaic as an email message.

For example, if you’re writing a message asking someone to fill out an employee information form, is it important, vital, or urgent? Each of these let’s the reader know that filling out the form is a big deal, but each conveys a different impression about what kind of big deal it is. (Of course, in choosing your words, you have to be honest. Don’t say that something is vital unless it really is vital for the reader, and not just something that will make your job easier. Don’t build yourself a reputation for crying wolf.)

People have a myriad of activities competing for their time and attention, even when they choose to read, they have endless choices of what to read. Each year, thousands of new books are published. Each month, new magazines hit the newsstands, and each day new newspapers are published. As if that isn’t enough, each moment someone somewhere updates a website with new articles, or new blog posts.

What we write doesn’t matter—novels, articles, essays, whitepapers, corporate reports, or email messages explaining the new vacation policy. People are free to choose whether to read what we write, read something else, or not read anything at all.

Given that, we should be grateful that any reader chooses to spend a bit if time reading something that we wrote, grateful that they’re giving their attention—however fleeting—to our words, to our ideas and thoughts.

And this gratitude should inspire us to do the best we can to convey our ideas and thoughts with grace and clarity. We should be inspired to do the work of writing and rewriting, scrutinizing words, sentences, and paragraphs, striving to make the meaning as clear as spring water.

I’m grateful for each reader who comes here to read my blog, and especially for those who respond in the comments or by email. The fact that you’ve chosen to come here, that you take the time to read my posts and respond helps motivate me to keep on writing, and to do my best to make the time you spend here worthwhile.

Thank you.

Congressman Bruce Braley made the following comments about H.R. 3548 on the floor of the House of Representatives:

Anyone who’s done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions.  There is no reason why the federal government can’t write tax documents and other public documents in language we can all understand.

Writing government documents in plain language will increase government accountability and will save Americans time and money.  Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to understand what the federal government is doing and what services it is offering.

What a concept: Government documents that are easy to understand.

I guess it made sense in Congress.  H.R. 3548 passed 376 to 1. (I wonder who voted against it, and why?)

A companion bill, S. 2291, has gone to the full Senate for a vote. Contact your senators and encourage them to support this bill.

So if you speak in a way no one can understand, what’s the point of opening your mouth?

Sounds like someone asking people to use plain language, doesn’t it?

Hint: This quotation was translated to English from another language.

Recently I gave a presentation about intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, and suchlike). I wanted to introduce the idea with an image that would give the audience a basic understanding that was based on their experiences, so I used this image:

No Trespassing sign

Signs like this are familiar to my audience here in the upper midwestern part of the United States. I figured that this image would help them grasp some of the ideas associated with intellectual property law: that is, just as you have to put these signs up on your property to protect it from trespassers, you have to take steps to protect your trademarks, copyrights, and patents.

Here’s another image I used for a different presentation, when I was talking about the consequences of losing control of a project. Here, the intent was to make a connection between the potentially catastrophic results of losing control of a car, with the potentially catastrophic results of losing control of a project.

A word of caution: Keep your audience’s cultural background in mind when selecting images. Any given image might have different connotations and associations for people from different countries. If the audience for the intellectual property presentation had been from a different culture, they might not have understood the significance of a bright yellow sign with the word “POSTED” in big bold letters. In that case, I might have used a different image I had, in which the sign said “NO TRESPASSING.”

Use your imagination when choosing metaphoric images for a document or a presentation. Where do you look for good images? I found the two photos in this post on Stock.XCHNG, which offers thousands of free images.

Contractions make your writing more accessible to the reader. Research shows that that they also enhance readability.

Go ahead, use contractions. Your readers will thank you. 

For more guidelines for using contractions, see my article “Contractions and How Not to Abuse ‘Em.”

How do you begin?

There’s no single “right” way to begin; there are at least as many ways to begin as there are writers (and possibly as many ways as there are writing projects). For example, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley likes to use a journal to get started:

Some days journal writing is a kick-start. I circle around a subject, working out what it is that I actually want to say. My ideas do a freefall on paper—quotes, concepts, opinion. Usually at some point it’ll start to come together and I’ll find that I have a starting point (and if I’m really lucky, I might even have an idea for an end point).

I know that half the battle is just getting my butt in that chair—getting started. Part of it is working through the angles until I have some specific viewpoint that I can run with. I’ve been known to write as if it were a letter to a friend—I know I’ve found my subject when I suddenly resent the slowness of the pen. Nothing is fast enough to grab these ideas. That’s when I start to type.

Here are some more ideas to help you make that first step:

• Do a brain dump. Take a blank piece of paper and just start writing down everything you know about the topic. Grammar doesn’t matter, spelling doesn’t matter, organization doesn’t matter. At this point, all that matters is capturing whatever you have in your head on the topic. (This is much like Wrigley’s journal method.)
• Write down all of the questions you can think of. Ask all of the Whos, Whats, Wheres, Whens, Whys, and Hows. Don’t worry about the answers at this point. You may know them, or you may know where to find the answers. That’s great, but come back later to begin filling them in.
• Create a mind map. A mind map is a diagram of an idea and all of the words, ideas, concepts, and so forth, that are related to that idea. (See this Wikipedia article on mind maps for more information.) Take another blank piece of paper and write your central topic in the middle of the page. Condense it down to as few words as possible. Put a circle (or square) around it. Then write down the first related concept, topic, word, or idea that pops into your mind in another, smaller circle, and connect the two with a line. If there’s a word to explain the relationship between the main topic and the related topic, label the line with that word. Continue adding ideas radially around the central topic, and add sub-topics to the sub-topics wherever they seem to fit. Don’t judge or evaluate; just toss it all out there as fast as you can.
• Think about the structure. Forget about the content for a moment, and ask yourself how you could structure the writing. When you boil it all down, there are only a few basic organizing principles for any type of information, which you can remember using the mnemonic LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy. (See my post “Structure: Choosing a different viewpoint” for more information.) When you’ve got your structure figured out, then you can begin filling things in.

What are your favorite methods for starting a writing project? Add them to the Comments.

By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. […]

The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth—or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible.

—Wendell Berry 

(With thanks to Alice Linsley.)

A “writing clinician,” Nancy Morgan, asked cancer patients in a Washington, DC, cancer center to write about how cancer had changed them, and how they felt about those changes. It was a simple exercise on the surface, but for many patients, expressing their thoughts and feelings helped improve their thoughts and feelings, in turn leading to a better quality of life.

In other words: Writing is good for you. 

This study was printed in the journal The Oncologist. You can download a PDF copy here.