I’m a writer and I belong to a critique group. We meet once a week to share our works-in-progress. We listen to each other read and then offer suggestions about how to correct mistakes, or barring that, simply fine tune the craft. It’s the most helpful thing a new author can do for herself. Every writer should join a crit group.
Three months ago, one of my co-authors made a comment about my submission, and I cannot get it out of my mind.
The lady took umbrage at my use of a term she didn’t know. The word in question? Discomposed. She told me she’d never heard it, which is fine. There are lots of words I don’t know. But she went on to say she didn’t think my readers would understand it either. She suggested I change the phrase.
I declined her recommendation, but the idea behind her discontent has bothered me ever since.
I understand her reasoning. I totally get it. The biggest mistake a writer can make, apparently, is to pen something so distracting it “takes the reader out of the story.” The fear is, if this unpardonable sin occurs, the dear reader might decide never to return. There are a lot of easily available distractions in our world today.
But I disagree with part of that train of thought. I think reading can (and should be) a means of learning new things, of broadening our vocabularies. Any time you hear someone mispronounce a word, rest assured, they learned it from reading it. That’s a good thing! I can remember reading 101 Dalmatians as a 10-year-old and being puzzled by the differences in British English vs. American English, although I didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time.
Words like “bachelor flat,” and “trousseau,” and “stacked plates on a lift.”
I was ten. I saw the words “bachelor flat” and my imagination produced something very thin. Trousseau? How do you even pronounce that? A lift? I learned what a dumbwaiter was by reading Harriet the Spy.
When I read The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, I kept my phone by my side with my Google Translate app open, waiting to type in the Spanish words I didn’t know. I finished the book, by the way.
So, if you want to use a word that pushes your reader to learn something new, go for it. If your writing is entertaining enough, enticing enough, the reader will come back to the story after puzzling over the meaning of the unknown.
Seems like that’s my job as the author. Write a book they can’t put down, and none of this matters.
Follow me on TikTok to hear about the words I run into each day that were previously unknown to me. Share your words with me. We can laugh about how badly we pronounce them.
But at the end of the day, we’ll be smarter than we were at the beginning. And that’s a good thing, too.
https://www.tiktok.com/@paulapeckham?lang=en
Oh, by the way … check out my new book. I am one of five authors who contributed to a Christmas anthology titled Christmas Love Through the Ages. The book is full of sweet, wholesome, Christmas-y stories that will get you in the mood for the holidays. Enjoy!
I don’t know how old I was when I realized the word “misled” wasn’t pronounced MIZ-eld instead of “miss-led”…
Of course, I knew what the word was when I heard it, but it always threw me off when reading it. Not, apparently, enough to cause me to go look it up, though.
Context can get you through a lot of stuff you don’t know.
My mispronounced words were SU-per-FLU-ous and WHORES duh VORES. I’ll leave you to guess what the last one should be. I asked Mama if we could eat some and got a really strange look in reply. I said “superfluous” at work when I was at least 26 or 27, and my co-workers LAUGHED at me. I believe I was talking about the necessity of a bra for myself at the time. Perhaps they were laughing about that instead.