Welcome to the slightly-new-and-hopefully-improved Words By Dawn blog
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Herein, I shall talk about various and sundry things, with topics ranging from book reviews to writing advice to random blatherings on whatever subjects I find intriguing that day or that minute. I hope you will read and comment. First up, some writing advice:
The Dictionary Is Your Friend
It always seemed like the dumbest adult statement ever: “If you don’t know how to spell it, look it up in the dictionary.”
How was I supposed to do that if I couldn’t spell the word in the first place? Duh, Mom.
Of course, I eventually realized that it was possible to look up a word you couldn’t spell, since most of the time I at least had an inkling of the first few letters. I learned how to better use the dictionary, too, and my vocabulary got a little bonus boost. And while I never went as far as Diane Court did, I did enjoy looking up new words and learning interesting ways to pepper everyday conversation with polysyllabic whoppers that confused and impressed both parents and teachers.
I never lost my love for the dictionary, though it was eventually sharing shelf space with various thesauri and quotation collections and any other wordy reference book I could find. I fell madly in love with the complete OED when I first learned about it, and still long for a copy of my very own, so I can pet it and love it and look up obscure etymologies.
Which brings me to my point, really – there are an awful lot of dictionaries out there, right on the internet. Google comes up with 243 million results for the word; a quick glance at the first page shows the big names, like Merriam-Webster, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford. There are medical dictionaries, language dictionaries, urban dictionaries (which is a very pleasant term for what is essentially a collection of vulgarities, sexual slang that puts the Kama Sutra to shame, and an astonishingly wide variety of ethnic and sexist insults), and more. They’re all out there, all free, and all very easy to access. So why, I have to ask, are professional, white collar people still unable to differentiate between choose and chose, lose and loose, and remembering to put the first “r” in library?
The dictionary is your friend. Its presence on the Internet means it can be your secret friend – no one has to know you can’t spell or that you rely way to hard much on spell check. But everyone will know when you send out the memo with all the misspellings or – worse yet – the national ad copy that encourages you to “except there help on all you’re most important clinet needs before it effects busines.”
Reread that bit in quotes, please. Count the errors. There are six. If you make one, that’s a slip, a simple mistake, a typo. But make more than one and you might be an idiot. OK, maybe you’re not REALLY an idiot, but you look like one. And that is bad for business.
Tags: writing advice
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