Search results
Dec 10, 2023 · Misunderstood tweets, hurried emails, or messages written without much thought can have big effects, which shows how important it is to use digital language carefully. There’s more to “choose your words wisely” in the digital era than just good manners. It’s a way to avoid misunderstandings.
For instance, you might choose your words more carefully around someone you don’t know very well, or use more formal words in your workplace than with your friends. We choose different words when we’re talking to children than when we’re talking to adults, and we tend to use precise language in academic or technical writing.
- What This Handout Is About
- Introduction
- “Awkward,” “Vague,” and “Unclear” Word Choice
- Writing For An Academic Audience
- Selecting and Using Key Terms
- Strategies For Successful Word Choice
- Questions to Ask Yourself
- Works Consulted
This handout can help you revise your papers for word-level clarity, eliminate wordiness and avoid clichés, find the words that best express your ideas, and choose words that suit an academic audience.
Writing is a series of choices. As you work on a paper, you choose your topic, your approach, your sources, and your thesis; when it’s time to write, you have to choose the words you will use to express your ideas and decide how you will arrange those words into sentences and paragraphs. As you revise your draft, you make more choices. You might as...
So: you write a paper that makes perfect sense to you, but it comes back with “awkward” scribbled throughout the margins. Why, you wonder, are instructors so fond of terms like “awkward”? Most instructors use terms like this to draw your attention to sentences they had trouble understanding and to encourage you to rewrite those sentences more clear...
When you choose words to express your ideas, you have to think not only about what makes sense and sounds best to you, but what will make sense and sound best to your readers. Thinking about your audience and their expectations will help you make decisions about word choice. Some writers think that academic audiences expect them to “sound smart” by...
When writing academic papers, it is often helpful to find key terms and use them within your paper as well as in your thesis. This section comments on the crucial difference between repetition and redundancy of terms and works through an example of using key terms in a thesis statement.
Be careful when using words you are unfamiliar with.Look at how they are used in context and check their dictionary definitions.Be careful when using the thesaurus.Each word listed as a synonym for the word you’re looking up may have its own unique connotations or shades of meaning. Use a dictionary to be sure the synonym y...Don’t try to impress your reader or sound unduly authoritative. For example, which sentence is clearer to you: “a” or “b”?Before you revise for accurate and strong adjectives, make sure you are first using accurate and strong nouns and verbs.For example, if you were revising the sentence “This is a good book that tell...Am I sure what each word I use really means? Am I positive, or should I look it up?Have I found the best word or just settled for the most obvious, or the easiest, one?Am I trying too hard to impress my reader?What’s the easiest way to write this sentence? (Sometimes it helps to answer this question by trying it out loud. How would you say it to someone?)We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance ...
- About
- If
- During
- During, while
Sep 16, 2022 · Before we get into how you can up your skills in picking the right words, first let’s talk about why word choice is so vital. When you use the wrong word to communicate your intended point, you weaken your writing. There are a few examples of how: Undermining own credibility. Confusing readers.
- Lindsay Kramer
Oct 5, 2023 · The Importance of Word Choice in Writing. Word choice refers to the words you choose to use when writing or speaking. It’s an essential element of good writing, which makes all the difference between an engaging and memorable piece and a dull and forgettable one.
Aug 1, 2023 · It is crucial to choose your words wisely, considering their potential impact and striving for clarity, empathy, and accuracy in your communication. Strategies for Choosing Words Wisely
People also ask
How do you choose your words?
What makes a good word choice?
How to choose your words wisely?
Why do we need to choose words wisely?
How do I choose the right word for my writing?
Why is word choice important in writing?
Feb 2, 2016 · If you made a mistake, how would you want another to respond? What brings out the best in your performance?
