Must Use Big Words

Lies they are all lies. Liers that told me over and over that good writers use sophisticated language or as I took it that good writers needed to use big words. However I never saw the point, I am not trying to dazzle anyone with my wit or my intelligence of being able to use vacuous or prosaic in a sentence. It seemed like they were trying to take me, the person, out of writing and leaving behind something that was seemingly stale an cold, that lacked humanity and character but instead was littered with literary jargon. It was a hedonist ploy to secure gratification not from one’s ability to communicate but from one’s large vocabulary and intelligence.

I never felt I was communicating any better being able to use so-called sophisticated language than the words that I used in my everyday manner of speech. Writing with more sophisticated language wasn’t going to suddenly turn me into a Hellenic where I could converse with great philosophers and thinkers of the Greek or Roman times or even modern times alike so what was the point? I am in fact quite content wallowing in my own literary eccentricity.

After all isn’t writing supposed to be the same as talking and that if you can write how you speak than you are communicating your point? I never felt the need to use sophisticated language to impress people with; my everyday spoken language is sophisticated enough. Normal people don’t carry around a thesaurus when they are conversing with other people so why should I feel the need to carry one around to write for a professor or teacher? Isn’t the purpose of communicating to actually communicate instead of loading our sentences with fancy words and unusual sentence constructions that in the end results in us scarcely being able to understand the point that we are trying to get across in the first place.

My aim in writing has never been to preach to people how smart I am or that I can ingenious and designation in a sentence correctly. I am a writer and my goal is to write so that I can communicate with other people. I have been a writer my whole life and have never had trouble communicating my point across to dozens of people but when I’m in school I am told that my language is too natural and not sophisticated enough that in fact makes me a bad writer. That is something I have been grabbling with to understand since middle school. Why is sounding natural such a bad thing? Isn’t your writing supposed to be natural? Who am I exactly supposed to be impressing? In the end I just ended up dealing with it and lugged around my trusted thesaurus so that I can appear to write more sophisticated though all the way grumbling under my breath of why that is even necessary in the first place.

Maybe sophisticated writing is just not me; maybe I just want to write like I talk in everyday life with the added necessity of correct spelling and punctuation to ease the translation from what I am thinking and what you are reading. Where do I as an individual and a writer stand when I am looking to have to impress everyone with how smart I am? I already know that I am smart and that if I really wanted to impress someone with my wit and my intelligence that I could but why am I even taking the effort in the first place. I don’t intend to get in any literary battle over syntax and word usage with any of the preachy know-it-alls that look down on me for using one, two and three syllable words versus four and five syllable words.

Does it make you a better communicator if you can use bigger words, I think not. I think that language is meant to be understood and sometimes smaller words do that job just as well as longer words. It doesn’t mean that I am uneducated, I just choose to have the reader see a piece of me in my writing and not come off as artificial and stagnant but as if there is a an actual living, breathing person behind the writing because that is who I am. So if I am ostracized for that then so be it because that is who I intend to be as a writer from now on.