Continued from page 1
Quality, Not Quantity It’s a lot of fun to look for
biggest words we can find to replace with; but it’s not productive. The goal is to find
word that makes
rest of
sentence sound its best; this also means that you only want to replace words that make a sentence unclear. It’s never fun to read a document that is full of words that you don’t understand or that you have to stop to regroup after each sentence. You also need to keep your audience in mind when choosing words.
Focus on Your Main Thoughts When you’re trying to decide which words to replace, it’s usually good to start with your main points. Remember what you learned in your writing class: Each paragraph should have a main sentence with
remaining sentences supporting it. Pick out your main sentences from each paragraph and make sure that they sound clear. From here, you should be able to pick out
ones that need attention.
The Second Opinion Never underestimate
power of a proofreader. They will always notice things that you don’t because writers tend to focus primarily on
topic they’re writing about. My proofreader (which happens to be my lovely wife) constantly comes up with concerns that I never think about. Most importantly, she always points out
words that don’t make sense to her and usually has a suggestion for a replacement. In
end,
goal is for a document is for it to make sense to your reader; so after you’ve used your other thesaurus tools, be sure that your final test comes from a reader, as well.
I find
thesaurus to be one of
greatest tools that we can use to put our documents over
top. Perhaps its decline in popularity is mainly due to many of us not knowing how to use it properly. Maybe this article will help
thesaurus to make a comeback. Well, at least now your documents can be “negated of imprecision”.

Rafael Van Dyke is the site owner of BETTERDOCUMENTS.COM and the editor of its articles & newsletters. Go to http://www.betterdocuments.com to subscribe to newsletters and to download FREE DOCUMENT TEMPLATES.