It’s very easy to do this when you use the wrong word, like using “affect” when you mean “effect,” because it makes you look like you either: When you undermine your credibility, you weaken the point you’re making in your writing. When you use the wrong word to communicate your intended point, you weaken your writing. Problems when you choose the wrong wordīefore we get into how you can up your skills in picking the right words, first let’s talk about why word choice is so vital. Read on and we’ll explain how you can make word choice your writing superpower. So how can you know which word is the right word to use when you’re writing? And how can you get good at it-maybe even excel at it? So while you might say “I remember I went to the library last Thursday,” you wouldn’t necessarily say “I reminisce about going to the library last Thursday,” unless it was a particularly special experience. For example, reminisce and remember are synonyms, but reminisce has an additional nuanced, specific meaning of fondly remembering times far in the past. To make word choice even more challenging, there are words that sound the same, but communicate different ideas (like “affect” and “effect”), words that mean the exact same thing, but have different spellings in British English and American English (like “grey” and “gray”), and perhaps the most confusing: words that are almost identical and communicate similar yet distinct ideas (like “historic” and “historical”).Īnd then there are words that are technically interchangeable but have different connotations. There are more than 171,000 words in the English language. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about every writer struggles with word choice from time to time. When you’re writing, picking the right word can sometimes be rigid.

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