Improving Style Through Diction, Part 6: Synecdoche

The figure of speech synecdoche, the use of a term to refer to something more specific or more general, is a useful device for adding creative spice to your writing. Synecdoche falls into two categories, microcosm and macrocosm. 

We employ microcosm synecdoche when referring to someone or something specific to mean what it represents in general, as in "They're no Einsteins" as a stand-in for geniuses, or "The houses in that neighborhood are Hearst Castles" to mean mansions. 

Alternatively, we use macrocosm synecdoche when referring to someone or something in general to mean what it represents specifically, as in "New Yorkers run in Central Park year round" to mean just that select group of people who run in Central Park no matter where they're from, or "the United States declared war" to mean only the United States Congress declared war. 

You probably use synecdoche in everyday conversation more than you think, but once you do begin to think about it, you'll get more creative with this valuable literary device.

Improving Style Through Diction, Part 5: Onomatopoeia

Words are never the thing they describe, but that does not stop them from trying. Take onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like the word it describes. Just by their sounds, can't you just picture the head getting a crew cut upon hearing buzz, the bodies that splash when hitting the water, or the floor being cleared with a broom that sweeps?

Literary Devices does a good job of explaining onomatopoeia and providing examples, in case you want to use this tool to enliven your writing.

Improving Style Through Diction, Part 4: Loanwords

The next time you hear people speaking a foreign language when suddenly an English word pops into their conversation, consider two points about word choice. First, they are using a loanword, a word adopted from one language by speakers of another language, more than likely to compensate for lack of a better word in their native tongue. Second, loanwords enrich language like few other linguistic conventions.

English has borrowed from too many languages to mention in a brief blog post: 80 percent of English words come from 350 languages, according to Dictionary.com. Most of us don't even realize how many of loanwords we commonly use, to name a few, amen from Hebrew, agriculture from Latin, beef from French, chess from Persian, cruise from Spanish, democracy from Greek, icon from Russian, zenith from Arabic, and zero from Japanese.

Why borrow words? (Steal is more like it, because we do not return loanwords.) Among many reasons, sometimes a language just cannot come up with a single word to mean what its users want to express. One of my favorite examples is the German zeitgeist, meaning the spirit of the time. The word trend falls short to capture this spirit, if you know what I mean.

You do not have to be an etymologist to appreciate the strange routes some loanwords morph into English. This is one of the delights of learning new words. How did they get here? 

Improving Style Through Diction, Part 3: Watch Those Homographs, Homophones, and Homonyms!

Reviewing our writing for errors with homographs, homophones, and homonyms is helpful since our inattention to them is the cause of many miscues.

Homographs are words that look the same but have different meanings. Knowing that a sewer is a drain as well as a person who sews will prevent you from writing sower, a person who plants, when you mean sewer.

Homophones are words that sound the same but can be spelled differently and have different meanings, such as affect, a verb meaning to influence, and effect, a noun meaning result. My trick to remembering these two is recall the a in affect because it is an action, while the e in effect is the end, or result. 

Homonyms are words that have the same spelling but different meanings, such as lie, the verb meaning to recline, and lie, the verb meaning to tell a falsehood. Not knowing the difference has made most people write, "Let's lay in the grass" when they mean "Let's lie in the grass."

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