If you're like me, you know more words than the average person, and if you're like me, then you've probably forgotten more words than most people will ever know. And if you're a writer like I am, then you may have a slight problem when it comes to choosing the right word without a thesaurus.
Now, most of the time, I don't run into this problem, but there comes the occasion when I've already used the perfect word twice in a paragraph, and though they are different, they basically mean the same thing. So when it comes time to use a third word that's relative, you blunder and hit a speed-bump.
For example:a
Perhaps her words did not upset him so much, but they angered me a great deal! She had a talent for speaking passive-aggressively, the underlying nastiness quite intentional. It (angered?) me to no end!
Strike that. How about: It frustrated me to no end? Or maybe "incited"?
Okay, that was a simple one, but the point here is to make the point—that sometimes you need to express the same emotion, or describe with the same adjective, or use the same adverb, or discuss the same noun. The trouble is, well...you can’t, or rather, you shouldn’t, employ the same anything in the same paragraph, or worse, the same sentence. That’s one of the first rules you learn in writing composition.
Two things to do are these: When you’re not editing your writing, or critiquing a fellow author’s work, and you have time to settle in and read, highlight the words that stand out—words that are so straightforward and perfect, but words that you’ve nonetheless forgotten. Then, when you’re stuck, you can revert back to that book or those books and flip through the pages to examine what you’ve picked out.
Also, you can simply Google “synonyms for________” That’s my favorite thing to do when I’m stuck because it offers so many alternatives! Using the synonyms feature in Word is fine, but the relative words are not as abundant as you find using the Google trick!
