Roget’s Thesaurus. Ah, heaven. I try my best to educate my students on the necessity of having a hard copy of this three-inch thick book around if they are truly interested in writing. After all, when we’re stumped for just the right word, they see me stand up and head to my bookcase. “It’s time for Biggie,” I say.
“Biggie” is my affectionate name for this massive tome and I always explain why it’s so helpful to have the actual volume around instead of just going online and getting the few synonyms offered by the Web thesaurus. “This book will actually help you find right words,” I say. Just today, for example, I had to get Biggie off the shelf just for this purpose.
My student and I were struggling, trying to find the exact word for that loud noise motorcycles make. We looked up noise and under that word we had several choices. We picked loudness and headed off to the part of the thesaurus where this word lives. This is where the fun begins. Once at loudness, we see all the nouns, adjectives and verbs with synonyms for this word. But also – and my favorite part – we see all around this entry, other entries that have to do with sound. We have silence and all those words and then faintness of sound, sudden sound, repeated sound, resonance, etc. This is where my heart goes pit-a-pat. Because it’s within these range of words that I can often stumble upon the absolutely perfect synonym I am looking for.
In this case, we settled for roar, but we had lots of choices. We could have picked yawl, squawk, clang, clatter, or a dozen more. Ah, what joy there is in having so many choices!
So, if you love writing and you do not already have a Roget’s Thesaurus, I highly recommend plopping down the $21.95 to get Bartlett’s edition in hard cover. You will use it over and over, and your writing will benefit immensely. And you’ll also have fun just learning more and more words as you peruse this magnificence resource.
Happy writing.
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