In reading about rhetoric, I’m confronted by an uncomfortable thought:
Every word you use should be there for a reason.
As a writer who works in first drafts and rough edits (!), you can understand why this thought made me panicky.
I don’t dedicate that level of attention to my writing, though I wish I could.
It’s difficult enough to abide by Orwell’s dictum—”If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out.” I can cut words all day long. But to take a long hard look at every word and ask: Is this the right one?
And “right” meaning the word that is clearer, more persuasive, more of what I actually want to say.
When I find myself repeating a word throughout a passage, it’s most often lazy writing: I’m not, as I admit, looking closely enough at each word I use. (When I repeat a word, it’s not usually ploce going on.)
Usually, I will roll my eyes at the offending word, pop it into a search engine plus “thesaurus,” and go from there. Of course, I’m not taking the first synonym that pops up, but I also don’t spend much time as I could evaluating my choices.
Certainly not the time that is possible, as per a passage in Jeanne Fahnestock’s wonderful book Rhetorical Style:
But synonym substitution can also have the effect of spreading out a concept so that it gradually “drifts” into alternate sense and connotations across a text. Thus, synonym substitution serves the art of term shifting in an argument, when, for example, a potentially unfavorable term is subsequently replaced with synonyms or partial equivalents with more useful connotations. This process is on view in an editorial in the Washington Post from 2007 which announces in a subtitle that its topic is illegal immigrants, already a choice that avoids the alternative illegal aliens. While illegal immigrant continues to appear in this argument against penalizing those who employ or rent to them, it is also replaced from sentence to sentence with undocumented immigrant, immigrant (minus modifiers), and once with newcomer, synonyms with neutral or even positive connotations (“Next Stop: Underground” 2007). In this way, substitution with apparent synonyms, a practice that can look like mere “elegant variation,” can do the work of category and value change in an argument.
Synonyms can do some serious work! Of course, it’s not as though they make the argument on their own, but they can subtly buttress your argument.
Taylor Coe 