How to Improve Your Writing--Avoid the Vizzini!

You've heard the joke about the man who was going into the hospital for a vasectomy. He dressed up in his best suit for the occasion. When asked why, he replied, "If I'm going to BE impotent, I'm going to LOOK impotent!"

We've all used the wrong word on occasion. Maybe we're tired and the brain isn't functioning as well as it should. Maybe we're just trying to impress somebody with our vocabulary and forget the meaning of the word that we use. Maybe we're just lazy. In any case, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) has finally given a name to these vocabulary slip-ups. Called Vizzinis, in honor of the character from the movie "The Princess Bride" who kept using the same word repeatedly regardless of whether it was appropriate or not, they are the words we use that sound like they might be right but definitely give our statements a different meaning from what we intended.

Doing this in speech is commonplace. We say a word, stop, realize it's not the word we wanted to use, go back, find the word we really wanted to use, use it, and go on (generally with an "I'm sorry, what I meant to say was" tucked in there somewhere). In writing, however, when Vizzinis show up it's an indication that the writer either never bothered to review his own writing or was simply lazy. And they're so easy to prevent.

Some of these gaffes are simple homonym swaps--using "to" when you meant "too", or "it's" when you should have used "its". However, it's the words that have close pronunciations that seem to give us the most grief in writing, especially when attempting to use synonyms or "big words" to convey our meaning. Eluding a letter or mistyping a syllable can change the entire tone of what we are trying to say.

Take this example: "Many seniors in nursing homes have legitimate health issues, such as incompetence." Sounds okay, but if you think about it, being incompetent isn't really a health issue (although sometimes I wish we could classify it as a mental health problem). More than likely the author meant to use the word "incontinence" instead. Or how about this: "The computer system crashed, but because of a lack of proper backup and recovery procedures, getting the IT department back up and running was nothing short of a debauchery." There's something wrong with the picture of this department having an orgy while trying to get the computers back in operation. I'm guessing the author meant "debacle" instead of "debauchery."

I frequently reference Dictionary.com and its sister sites, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com, when writing. I highly recommend you utilize these or similar sites to assist you in your composition. In this day of near-immediate information access, there's no excuse for letting the wrong word slip through into your articles. Too many of those and your readers will quickly infer that you're not as good a writer as you claim, which quickly translates into you're not as knowledgeable on your topics as you want people to believe. In other words, you're a phony.

I also recommend "toning it down" when you write. Having all those high-falutin' fancy-schmancy words may make you seem highly intelligent, but the down side is too many words with unknown definitions may turn your readership off. Besides, the more words of this type you use, the better the odds a Vizzini will pop up. Eschew obfuscation and introduce new vocabulary to your readership a word or two at a time. And be sure to include the definition so people don't have to sit down with your article and a dictionary to figure out what you're trying to say.

If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you need to make sure what you say doesn't interefere with what you mean. Utilize the tools you have at hand to help avoid those nagging Vizzinis. Oh, and if you noted that I should have used "eliding" instead of "eluding" above, congratulations. You're well on your way to hunting down and eliminating those annoying little Vizzinis from your prose!