Diction (a peek at the longest word ever)

I'm feeling better - thank you. Let's get back to where we left off. Blogging!

Today I'd like to touch on the subject of word choice - diction.

Whether you're searching for the correct word for verbs, adverbs, or adjectives, word choice is one of the most important aspects of your story. The right word can elevate your tension, or kill it.

The more I read, the more I understand that word choice is also governed by audience. Who is your story intended to reach? If it's other writers - break out that thesaurus and scribble obscure words to your heart's content. This is most common in literary novels or works for literary magazines.

However, if you're writing a mainstream adult novel, you might want to pull back a little. Because (be honest with yourself now) how many times have you read a current novel and come across a word you weren't familiar with? Probably once or twice per book, right? With so many words out there, we can't possibly know them all - all the time. Now, did you stop your progression of reading and look up that vocab word like they made you do in third grade? No, of course not. You don't have time for that. You skipped the word, the context of the situation being enough to just ignore it.

And if you've read children's writing (YA, MG, picture books) lately, you know the vocab is even more accessible because words that are old hat to us are just being learned by them.

Now, I'm not trying to suggest that we lose our diction. I'm not suggesting we resort to using just the words that we say in a normal work day. Heck, we'd be limited to a slim thirty or forty vocab words forever.

Instead, keep your audience in mind when writing. Will the word you just chose be more of a stumbling block for your reader rather than a helpful hint? Will they have to skip it and figure out the scene from the rest of your words? Is that what you want?

To leave you this week, I have found the longest word in the English language. It has 189,819 letters (enough alone for its own series of books) and is the chemical name for the element titin.

Want to see this word? Check out the YouTube video here. But be forewarned, it takes three and a half hours to pronounce.