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Small Word vs Right Word

Writing for Middle-Grade

“Hi little baby. Aren’t you cute? Yes you are. Oh yes you are.”

“Dude, I’m twelve. What’s wrong with you?”

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Many writers assume that because they are writing for a young audience they must write down, simplify their word choices, and make their writing easier to read. As I frequently spend a lot of time reading books for middle-graders to compare the genre, I see a lot of this sort of thing. There are some writers who stand out in a good way, for not “dumbing down” their writing, and these have books as New York Times best sellers partly due to this. Many children are drawn to the mental exercise of reading slightly above their grade level.

 

Unless you are required to teach children how to read, in which case you should really be in a classroom instead of behind a desk writing a book, assume that your reader already knows how. He is picking up your story to learn something new. This doesn’t require you to write to fifth graders at a 12th grade reading level. But choose the right word for the right occasion. Don’t choose easier words than you would have written otherwise for the sake of young readers.

 

Some conventions are absolutely necessary when writing for a young audience, and these usually have to deal with plot and characterization rather than word choice. When writing for young ones, limit anything that wouldn’t be found in a PG movie at the theatre. This means no blood and guts, no foul language, and no sex. (Interestingly, foul language is a characterization problem, not simply a matter of word choice. If you are writing a middle-grade story featuring a character that would use that sort of language, it’s likely time to revise your character.)

 

When I was in grade school, we did an exercise that had to deal with synonyms and ranks. Children do actually understand synonyms and why they are used. Our teacher had us list all the words we could think of at the time for “big”, words like “large”, “huge”, “gigantic”, “enormous”. Then we would rank those words according to how we imagined their sizes to differ.

 

Now, put this to work for you. Compare “big city” vs “sprawling metropolis”. They mean essentially the same thing. But the reader gets a different picture, in fact, a clearer one, when reading the second phrase.

 

Does that mean we’ll never use “big” in our Fiction? I can just imagine those folks living in the Big Apple (New York City) about to throw a fit. And as anyone in the United States knows “everything’s bigger in Texas”. Did you notice how that last statement was in quotes? Here’s an interesting twist. When you are developing a character’s speaking patterns, you’ll want to make dialogue especially ring true. That means if your character would say “big city”, then that is how you’ll write their dialogue. In so doing, you are still putting the key concept of this article into practice: the right word for the right occasion.

 

You will also want to be cautious of taking the other extreme, choosing big words just because they sound impressive. A true indication that you have developed a degree of skill as a writer will be when you no longer have to slave to find the right word for the occasion. I know as I was starting out, I would frequently use my thesaurus. At that point, to me the higher the number of syllables the word had, the more likely I was to use it, regardless of meaning. That was a very detrimental practice, especially when the word meant something very different than I thought it did. I learned a lesson from that, and this sort of problem can be easily remedied. When we cannot decide on which word to use, a good dictionary will be very specific and will give examples.

 

If you are reading this article, you already have a dictionary at your finger-tips, as Google’s own definition tool is very useful in this regard. You can access this tool by writing any word into Google’s search bar, followed by the word “definition”. This can be a very effective tool while honing your writing craft.

 

If you make it a practice to choose the right words for the right occasions, not only will your audience flock to your books when they are young, but many will return to your stories to read again for the nostalgia of a good book when they are older. And having an audience who will choose to read your book twice is definitely a sign of solidly good writing.