Re: In love with a word

[David Castro <thejavaguy -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On 1/4/06, Julia Countryman <julia -at- dreamcatcher-media -dot- com> wrote:

> The key to being a good, effective writer is to get the message across as
> simply and as clearly as possible.  Fancy words used flagrantly are a
> display of an insecure ego

Funny that this should come up...I was considering posting about an
epiphany that I had a couple of days ago.

I inherited content from someone who was just let go from my company.
The guy could really turn a phrase, when he had the time. He used the
perfect sentence structure, and the perfect word. The content got
across *exactly* what it was supposed to...if the reader was at the
same level as this writer. We write for the military, which requires
that we write to the seventh grade level. I'm going to be making a
pass through the two documents that I currently own to simplify both
sentence structure and vocabulary. It may mean replacing one really
good word with five mediocre words that are required to get the point
across to my audience.

My epiphany: sometimes there's the Perfect Word and the Most
Appropriate Word. They're frequently not the same thing!

-David Castro
 thejavaguy -at- gmail -dot- com
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