Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39021
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **Using words wrongly or awkwardly sounds much worse than having a restricted vocabulary.** Therefore, your best bet is to stick to words you know well and are comfortable with. If that includes a wider variety of words, great! But if that restricts you to simpler words, so be it. _It's entirely possible to build an impressive, elegant style entirely out of [simple words](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/83305-poor-faulkner-does-he-really-think-big-emotions-come-from)._

I have recent personal experience with this. I'm working on a book aimed at a middle-grade audience. When I made the choice to switch to a first-person narrator I had to go back through the book and simplify my word choices. But in many cases that resulted in stronger, more vivid or less cliched sentences.

Salting your language with fancy words rarely produces the desired impression --instead it gives the impression you are trying too hard. If those words are actually part of your fluent vocabulary, you won't need to _try_ to use them.

Original score: 11