Monday, February 5, 2007

Beware of the saurus¹

Reading an essay from a college freshman many years ago, I came across a sentence that baffled me — it referred to "ingesting an orange." I crossed out "ingest," wrote "eat," and wondered why anyone would've written otherwise. At the time, it didn't occur to me that my student had very likely started with "eat," only to cross it out and substitute a word that seemed somehow better — lofty, less plain, more imposing.

Since then I've taught many students who seek to improve their writing by using "better" words. Their revision strategies focus on replacing plain words with big, shiny ones. Such students usually rely on a thesaurus, now more available to a writer than ever before as a tool in many word-processing programs.

But dressing up a piece of prose with thesaurus-words tends not to work well. Here's why: a thesaurus suggests words without explaining nuances of meaning and levels of diction. So if you choose substitute-words from a thesaurus, it's likely that your writing will look as though you've done just that. The thesaurus-words are likely to look odd and awkward, or as a writer relying on Microsoft Word’s thesaurus might put it, "extraordinary and uncoordinated." When I see that sort of strange diction in a student's writing and ask whether a thesaurus is involved, the answer, always, is yes.

A thesaurus might be a helpful tool to jog a writer's memory by calling up a familiar word that's just out of reach. But to expand the possibilities of a writer's vocabulary, a collegiate dictionary is a much better choice, offering explanations of the differences in meaning and use among closely related words. Here's just one example: Merriam-Webster’s treatment of synonyms for awkward.

What student-writers need to realize is that it's not ornate vocabulary or word-substitution that makes good writing. Clarity, concision, and organization are far more important in engaging and persuading a reader to find merit in what you're saying. If you're tempted to use the thesaurus the next time you're working on an essay, consider what is about to happen to this sentence:

If you're lured to utilize the thesaurus on the subsequent occasion you're toiling on a treatise, mull over what just transpired to this stretch.
¹ Not the dog.

comments: 8

Anonymous said...

I agree whole heartedly. A recent essay that was turned in to me read: "Various sit with their countenance lit by the blaze of their computer monitors..."

As if students felt that we wouldn't realize this was, to borrow a computer term they might be more familiar with, "hacked."

(By the way, this particular section is also plagiarized, available on a number of paper-purchasing websites.)

Michael Leddy said...

I'm laughing, both at the sentence and at the thought of someone buying it. Thanks for the comment!

Elaine Fine said...

Michael! I just waded through some "thesauric" papers from otherwise rather intelligent students. I'm referring them to your post right away.

The Chemist said...

I have to say, while I'm sure the context was different in the case you mentioned, "ingesting an orange" has a certain poetic ring to it.

Michael Leddy said...

Yes, in the right context, "ingest" could be funny and apt. In the essay I was reading, it was just a sign of thesaurus-hunting. : )

Anonymous said...

I've always hated having to read a paper where the author clearly replaced 90% of the words in the original document with a loosely related synonym.

Regardless of this fact I made a web thesaurus replacement machine which magically grabs a random word from an online thesaurus to replace words in a document. Brilliant and amusing indeed. I'm sure it will come in handy for a few college students looking to spice up their written word.

Vic Grahata said...

I enjoy your blog and use it in class to demonstrate many ideas to students. But I disagree wholeheartedly about abandoning the thesaurus. With limited vocabularies already, my students don't know which better words to search out in a dictionary, and using the thesaurus, with a dictionary at hand as well, helps them find new words to which they will become familier. I encourage them to save these words as a list and use the ones they find particularly useful again and again to improve their vocabulary. Honestly, the thesaurus was the only way I passed the GRE language component, and it seems the only way that students become familiar again with action verbs and descriptive adjectives. Yes, it sounds lofty at times. Yes, sometimes inappropriate words are chosen. But I choose not to penalize them for this when the effort is clearly present. They rediscover language, and sometimes they discover that words and the play of putting words together isn't such a boring task after all.

Michael Leddy said...

I would agree that a thesaurus can be a helpful spur to one’s thinking about language. But in my experience, students relying on a thesaurus are working from the mistaken assumption that the key to good writing is longer words. Nancy Sommers wrote a now-classic piece about that. I’d rather see students think about diction by, say, replacing forms of to be with sharp, lively verbs (that they probably already know).

By the way, I don’t penalize anyone for using a thesaurus; I only point out which words don’t work and why.