Choose the Word That Knows What It Means

Few writers mean to be vague. They get there one defensible word at a time. “Significant” is safer than naming the size. “Issue,” “aspect,” “factor” and “situation” can stand for almost anything, which is why they tend to turn up when the writer is not sure what.

In 1946, in “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell ran the slide on purpose. He took a verse from Ecclesiastes, which says that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, but that time and chance happen to them all, and translated it into the English of an official report: objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities shows no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity. The race, the battle and the bread had dissolved into “competitive activities,” and the reader had nothing left to picture.

To test an impressive word, see whether a plainer one could replace it with no loss of information. Sometimes the exact word is the long one: a memoir about a stroke may need “ischemic,” because it is what the doctor said and what the writer had to learn to pronounce. Our explanation is that a reader builds the scene or the claim from the words supplied and fills any gap with a default, the most average version available, so a room described as “nice” is furnished from the reader’s own idea of nice.

A word exact for a specialist can still be opaque to the general reader and need a gloss or a substitute. In a first draft a vague word is often an honest placeholder (Practice 27 argues for them), and a character who gropes for a word is being exact about groping.

Practice. Take a page of your own, around three hundred words. Find five words you could not point at or draw: “thing,” “aspect,” “impact,” “interesting,” “utilize,” whatever your own habit supplies. For each, write one plain sentence saying what you actually meant, then find the word that names it. Replace the original only if the sentence now claims something that could be wrong. If one of the five turns out to cover a claim you would rather not commit to, that is the finding; decide whether to make the claim or cut the sentence, all inside twenty minutes. As a rough guide of ours, replacing four of the five suggests the page was mostly hedging, and replacing none suggests it already committed to its claims.