Spicing Up Your Word Bank

Generic. Schmeric. Tumeric.

Tonight I spent the evening with a 13 year old boy, a thesaurus on a smart phone, and an old-school-clobber-someone-with-it-dictionary. Buckets of fun, right? RIGHT!

Despite the ever-so-descriptive word "thing," (does anyone else see the sarcasm in my writing yet?) this young man had a few other words that needed to be less generic. After 45 minutes we had turned an average paper into a creative paper with flow. Realize to recognize. Treated bad to mistreated.

I often get caught up in my own head, and before I recognize it I am using the same descriptive word two or three times in one paragraph. How is this original content? As a copywriter and blogger I know the important of each and every word standing alone in description before becoming a part of the entire collection (alternated 'collection' instead of 'piece'). Generic content does not push your work to the top or to the attention.

Here's my tips for changing a ho-hum piece into something creative yet realistic:

1. Pick out 2 words from every sentence you write and circle them.
2. Look up the circled words in a Thesaurus, and then write out 2 of the Thesaurus suggestions as their replacements.
3. Read the new sentences with Thesaurus suggestions to make sure they are of applicable usage.
4. If you do not know a word suggested in the Thesaurus, look it up in the Dictionary - this is a great tool to help your scrabble skills too!
5. Read the new sentence aloud after making the final suggestive corrections and be sure it still sounds like "you", just an upgraded version.

Try this for at least a week on all of your writing. It will help to expand your vocabulary as well as get creative words flowing as "instant picks" in your brain's word bank.

Originally published through Whole Story Media Group