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The average western reader would not know the difference if you told them that your heroes rested in the shade of a rhubarb tree or tied their horse to a gigantic parsley. Even western works that ...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:57Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34364 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:19:47Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34364 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:19:47Z (about 5 years ago)
The average western reader would not know the difference if you told them that your heroes rested in the shade of a rhubarb tree or tied their horse to a gigantic parsley. Even western works that talk about people walking through a grove of ash or poplar only evoke a vague sense of woodsiness in the average city dweller. I think some have a vague sense that certain tree names belong to certain locales so if you say cottonwood they see the West and if you say mangrove they see the jungle, but they would not actually recognize these trees if they fell out of them. If you want the reader to actually have some idea of what your trees look like, therefore, you need to describe them. If you just want them to have some vague sense of locale-specific woodsiness (which is probably the best you can hope for with most readers) then use whatever name seems to have the most romantic associations with the area you are writing about.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-03-17T14:22:29Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 22