Monday, June 28, 2010

Words I don't know and other writing woes

Writing is an entire language of its own. There's beauty to be found in a few written phrases over the cacophony of spoken word. However, I'm not a phenomenal writer despite a short, illustrious and unpaid career as a blog writer. Oh the trailblazers who write for free. However, I dream of a world outside the electronic realm of publishing. I long for a collection of words bounded and printed on the deceased flesh of a dozen bleached and pressed infant trees. I want to cherish my name which has been carefully crafted upon the binding which contains stories of the past all contained in the comfort of thinly sliced bark that I ordered to be slaughtered. Yes, a relic of my upbringing, I dream of writing a book. Realistically, to receive the recognition required for a ragamuffin of my rank, I must resolve to remedy and remove reins that restrain my resounding rapport for writing about the past. That last verb counts too, right?

See? There's the problem. I get going and then I unexpectedly run into a wall. Call it a lack of functioning vocabulary but sometimes I'm searching for a word that just might not be in my head. I try not to let it get me down but it's frustrating to find myself recycling the same words. Thankfully, I seem to have some obtainable options.

There's lots of good tips out there but what I hear most from writers that I personally respect is two major tips 1) just write and 2) keep good footnotes. DailyWritingTips also has a great  many resources written in layman's terms that any writer person would benefit from. Tips include basics that I should remember but don't like how  to properly write numbers and what does [sic] mean to middle-of-the-road problems like redundancies  and even a great Latin  prefix and suffix primer for those that care.

To be a better reader, I take notes and write all over my books when I read. I underline with a pencil, write references and questions in the side margin and occasionally write a few cuss words in the header. From time to time, I come across words or events that I don't recognize. In which case, I flip to the front page before the title and make a note if the page and title of the event. Therefore, most of my books have really ugly inside cover pages. I also write down any new words in English that I am unfamiliar with or, more commonly, that I've heard, I kind of understand but would be hard pressed to produce on my own in my own work. I am a little hesitant to admit the following words but I suppose we all have room for improvement; that's just what I'm telling myself when I feel your judgmental stare at the screen. The following list is from the insides of as many books I can find laying around:

abrogate
promulgate
efficacious
impetus
apocryphal
scion
repudiate
ostensibly
gendarmerie
panacea
persona non grata
billet
polemics
mea culpa
pugnacity
clandestine
settee
gauche
bailiwick
neophyte
replete
approbation
ad valorem
hegemony
succinct
missive
consternation
and my personal favorite out of the bunch: verisimilitude

First step: find an opportunity to use gauche in a sentence.
Next step: look up "gauche" in the dictionary.

1 comments:

Galinaros said...

It seems to me that you already have two important factors in writing well: patience and a desire to improve. ^^

I could learn a thing or two from you. From my perspective, you're doing quite well.

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