I shouldn't be commenting at 12am.
Sep. 19th, 2007 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Seriously. I just spammed this person 4 times to say "repetition ain't always bad", and I almost feel like I should comment again to say sorry.
But I'm right. We all know high school English teachers who swear up and down that we should swallow a thesaurus every day before breakfast. And they have a point - overusing a word makes you sound like you have a small vocabulary. But if you do it right, using the same word over and over again packs a punch.
And even if you're not doing it to be forceful, spinning all around to find a new word for a common one just makes you sound like you tried too hard (and dialog in a novel should definitely not sound like that, I think).
I know somebody who is busily writing essays to win scholarships for college. She called me up the other day, needed to know a new word for "therefore". Thought she was using it too much. Thing is, there's only so many ways you can say therefore, and if you use them all in one essay, everybody will think you're a poor writer who scoured the dictionary so as to not repeat yourself because of the "rule". If you really think you use it too much, the only solution is to completely rewrite the sentence so the therefore is unnecessary, which is what I told her, though I couldn't think of a way to do so over the phone. I hate the phone.
But I'm right. We all know high school English teachers who swear up and down that we should swallow a thesaurus every day before breakfast. And they have a point - overusing a word makes you sound like you have a small vocabulary. But if you do it right, using the same word over and over again packs a punch.
And even if you're not doing it to be forceful, spinning all around to find a new word for a common one just makes you sound like you tried too hard (and dialog in a novel should definitely not sound like that, I think).
I know somebody who is busily writing essays to win scholarships for college. She called me up the other day, needed to know a new word for "therefore". Thought she was using it too much. Thing is, there's only so many ways you can say therefore, and if you use them all in one essay, everybody will think you're a poor writer who scoured the dictionary so as to not repeat yourself because of the "rule". If you really think you use it too much, the only solution is to completely rewrite the sentence so the therefore is unnecessary, which is what I told her, though I couldn't think of a way to do so over the phone. I hate the phone.
