A Misconception.

Helen was surprised recently when I took a vocabulary test and discovered that mine is about average for my age. She imagined, as most people do I suspect, that being a writer means you must have a large vocabulary.

It isn’t true, of course. The secret of using language well isn’t to show off your knowledge of rare, elongated words, thereby forcing the great unwashed to reach for their dictionaries. It’s about using the right words, and using them well. And it’s often the case that simple words have more power than big or arcane ones. An example, if I may.

I recently quoted the last sentence of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death as my favourite piece of alliteration:

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable Dominion over all.

Stringing together those four words beginning with D is powerful not just because they all begin with D, but because together they also strongly evoke the sense of the end to which we must all come, even the rich and privileged like Prince Prospero. But you would hardly say that darkness, decay, death and dominion come from the further reaches of an extended vocabulary.