Word Choice

Sometimes I get papers where it looks like the writer right clicked each word and went thesaurus crazy. Many students want to improve their vocabularies - but the best way to do that is by reading. Most often the initial word choice works better. The exception might be where the same word gets used over and over. In that case I do encourage students to think carefully and vary word choice to make their meaning more clear. Until I found this image on a blog post of college humor about More Accurate Book Titles For This Semester's Reading List I never considered that the problem might stem from the source of so many ills that plague composition work - procrastination and lack of time for revision.

The post had some other great book title revisions. The ones by Joyce and Homer cracked me up.

While on the topic of word choice, The Oatmeal has some brilliance re: the word "literally."