elucipher-deactivated20151112:

The first part is gathering new words; and for that, you have to read. I read like a fiend, and there’s a text file on my computer where the words live, the startling or strange or beautiful ones I’ve found and salvaged—words like alluvial, foundling, sough, pythian, zaffre, immured, casuistry, apparatchik, euchre, vespertine, illume, serein. I love hefty, visceral words: gulch, gafty, raddled, susurrous, bathyal, farrago, chaparral, lithic, smelter, curmurring. A lot of it is just sifting through language, chasing etymologies, paying attention to the sound and weight and colour of words. 

The second part is deliberately unlearning everything you’ve been taught about “standard” or “normative” language use (because that’s just one register available to you). Read weird fiction and imagist poetry and magic realism and Shakespeare and nonsense verse and Lolita and anti-novels and poetic prose and essays and A Clockwork Orange and Beloved and surrealist short stories and postmodern pastiche and weird Twitter—you can be irreverent with language, you can twist it and smash it and carve it up and fuse it together to get brief gulps of the extraordinary. This language belongs to you; you own it by climbing inside it, until you know the spare flesh from the bare bones. That’s how you develop style. 

The third part is knowing when and how to use your word-hoard. This is something you learn by writing and writing and writing; and reading—particularly poetry, because it’s a condensed stained-glass rhetoric in which every word is exact and no other will do. Your writing should adapt to audience and context and purpose; no one has just one style. For academic writing, you don’t want peacocking and acrobatics; you want clarity. 

Don’t confuse complication and obscurity for complexity and intelligence. It’s about knowing when to use viridian or chartreuse or olive or glaucous or chrysoprase, and when to use green—and when to use no adjective at all; when to use simple strong words because good writing is not a smokescreen and sometimes there’s no better word than dark or pale or think or true. If in doubt, use a simple word and use it boldly.