Part 4: Vocabulary and Grade Level of Your Writing

The biographical novel about Jack London, called Sailor on Horseback, by Irving Stone, tells of London’s failure to strike gold in the famous 1849 Gold Rush, but his success in mining stories from the prospectors. But hearing their stories and writing them into literature were two different types of achievement. His plan was most likely to get rich, rather than write about other men’s getting rich. He’d been a newspaper correspondent, but again, that is different from writing literature. (Hemingway said in an interview journalism interferes with a writing career.) Anyway, Jack London found himself a bit deficient in the vocabulary he needed. So, what did he do?

According to Stone, London wrote words down with their definitions on little pieces of paper and stuck them around the mirror where he shaved his chin every morning. When he had mastered those, he replaced them with other words. That’s one way, I suppose, but if you shave in your car on your way to work, seek otherwise, for vocabulary is ultra important to the writer.

Other than the study of Latin, perhaps the best way to learn new vocabulary is wide reading of gradually increasing difficulty with a dictionary and a notebook at your fingertips. You could just make a list of those words and look them up later, but if you check them out while reading the text, you’ll have a good example of a word’s use, and understand the story to a greater extent. But successful writers are clever. You must realize when they misuse a word deliberately because of their sense of humor.

Now your own writing to date. If you blog, take a look back. Are most of your words five letters or under? If so, you need to increase your vocabulary. I realize you are not trying to write great literature with your blog, but blogging is practicing the art of writing. Why not try to excel even in it? When you have an unlimited vocabulary to select from, you don’t need to succumb to that host of four-letter words, commonly referred to as “dirty words.” Characters in your stories may use such words, if you’re writing about that sort of people, but you, as author, need not stoop in that depth, even in your blog. Respect yourself!

But be advised: the idea is not to use the longest word possible, but to use the best word possibleand it is often eight or more letters in length.

If your monitor is like mine on the Word Processor which I write these on, at the top you have a check mark with ABC above it. To find the grade level of your writing, highlight a section and click on the ABC. After its checking your spelling, you have the option for readability level and ease. Place a checkmark at that spot and up will come the grade level, the percentage of Passive Voice usage, reading ease, and more. My blog today rates a 9.0 grade level with no passive sentences, a bit low for me.

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