Elementary School-Approved Advice for Your Best Writing
A quick trick to enhance your writing and all you had to do was graduate third grade.
My third grade teacher taught SAT words to my class.
Imagine a group of 8 year olds playing at recess and saying things like “Those math problems were arduous!” and “Stop being so persnickety, it’s my turn on the swings!”
Needless to say, over two decades later, I remember some of those words. I also remember that they never came up on the SAT exam, but it didn’t matter. The point wasn’t to teach us big, fancy words to get ahead of our fellow third graders or to impress our parents (although both of those did occur naturally). It was about expanding our vocabulary at a young age to drive creativity as we got older. Learning new words is a strategy to feed the massive appetite writers tend to have for mind stimulation and creative inspiration.
Discovering a new way to communicate, whether it’s one word or an entire language, pushes your mind into spaces you didn’t know existed. It allows for the creation of something new, a location you’ve never visited before, a trail of thoughts you’ve never blazed before. That’s how a writer can break down barriers in the art, pushing their writing into a different dimension.
Here’s how it works: you learn a new word. You use it in a sentence. You start thinking of ideas inspired by the sentence. Your ideas create a foundation for a new story. Your new story challenges your conventional writing style because it’s framed around a word you’ve never written about before.
Imagine how dynamic your new stories can be if you learned a new word everyday.
The best part about expanding your vocabulary is that you can start immediately. Resources like Word Genius and most official dictionary websites offer some sort of ‘word of the day’ email — it’s the quickest, easiest way to enhance your writing. You may find that your newly learned lingo can be easily applied in day to day conversations: another source of inspiration for story ideas.
It’s also a reminder to never stop learning. As long as you crave the opportunity to discover something new, you can find a way to shape it into a unique anything. New words will bring your writing to places unknown, quite possibly somewhere beyond your years — that’s why learning at any age should never “abate.”
