The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
oh my word!
Awise editor once told me: “There is no such thing as a good writer. There are only good rewriters.”
He meant that no one gets every sentence right first time.
An idea flows from brain to page as writing. But then it needs rewritten, honed, edited, polished and (almost always) to have some words removed.
The end product should be tight, pithy prose that reveals its meaning in an easy-to-understand way but is also elegant and memorable.
The best writing is not just writing which tells you something, it tells you it in style.
The rewriting process is something I find greatly enjoyable.
I go over and over what I’ve written and substitute words here or there; I experiment with short or long sentences; swap adjectives in and out to see how they retune what I want to say.
I keep going until I think I’ve got it right.
You have probably read book reviews which gush: “every sentence sings”.
Believe me, the words will have been coaxed into song by an author’s long labours.
Winston Churchill was quoted as saying: “A good speech should take an hour to write for every minute it takes to deliver.” And Sir Winnie did, it must be admitted, deliver a good speech or two.
However, in doing all this rewriting you will sometimes use a word so often, have it this way and that in so many different parts of a sentence, that you end up looking at it and thinking: “is that word really a word?”
If you repeat it aloud it doesn’t sound right.
When it is on the page you look at it askance and can’t even remember what it means. It has become an alien.
This happened to me recently with the word “stilt”.
No matter which word does this to you, this is a recognised occurrence.
It is called semantic satiation.
The definition is: “A psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener or writer.”
In the vast majority of cases, if you leave the word alone for a while the problem will disappear.
Just for fun, you can do it to yourself by repeating a word out loud until it stops feeling like an actual word.
One word which triggers what I think is a bout of national semantic satiation is “amazing”.
The modern world has utterly lost sight of that word’s correct definition.
Only politeness stops me making comment every time I encounter “amazing” applied to what are clearly unamazing things.
This morning, after expressing my elevenses desires at a cafe, the girl taking my order responded by saying: “Amazing.”
If she was truly amazed by a wee, fat, grey-haired bloke ordering coffee and buttered toast then she should get out more.