Avoid 'dead words,' such as 'good,' 'bad' and 'said'

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Avoid “dead words,” such as good, bad, go, make, thing and said.

That’s what a growing army of fed-up teachers are saying (er, howling?), The Wall Street Journal reported this week in a story headlined, “’Use More Expressive Words!’ Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore. To encourage lively writing, instructors put certain words to rest; no more ‘fun.’”

The push to get texting-addicted youngsters to expand their vocabularies is spearheaded by educators who are bleary from grading essays littered with awesome, sweet and rad. The anti-“dead words” movement even suggests lessons for communicators and other wordsmiths, though perhaps not those the educators are pushing.

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The campaign faces resistance from writers and teachers who deride the push for students to grab a thesaurus and dig up florid alternatives to commonplace words that are not dead by any linguistic definition.

Tombstones for words

The point is to get young writers to avoid dull diction. Search the Web for “dead words,” and you’ll find teaching aids that include images of tombstones engraved with happy, mean, stuff and things. Evidently, some college instructors, too, have had it up to here with papers choked with lots and very and so.

There are 250 alternatives to went on this chart, among them galumphed and chugged. One assignment requires students to write a “dead word” on a picture of a gravestone and list alternatives below.

Some of these alternatives are indeed more pungent. Instead of gross, why not disgusting, foul, nasty, sickening or unpleasant; for dirty, how about dingy, filthy, grimy, putrid, grubby or soiled?

That may miss the point, however. Better to vividly describe your subject—the glob of moldy stuffing at the back of the fridge—and let readers make up their own minds on whether that is foul, nasty, gross or simply an acquired taste.

Some anti-dead words activists seem to devote a lopsided portion of class time to eradicating said. A British Columbia school district posted 397 alternatives to the straightforward attributive.

The Journal reports:

“There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use,” said (or affirmed) [schoolteacher Leilen] Shelton, whose manual “Banish Boring Words” has sold nearly 80,000 copies since 2009.

Her pupils know better than to use a boring word like “said.” As Ms. Shelton put it, “'Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list.”

Teachers even have the kids editing famous writers. When a student revises a line from James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Molly Bloom’s ecstatic bedroom cry of “yes I said yes I will Yes,” sounds more like a frat boy promising to attend a kegger: “yes I hollered yes I will Definitely.”

Literary apocalypse

The push to smite “dead words” has raised hackles in part because the term traditionally refers to words that have passed from use, such as the Anglo-Saxon wer for man (hence werewolf).

Besides, fancy attributives can clutter prose. In a blog post responding to the Journal article, “Another Sign of the Coming Middle-School Literary Apocalypse,” writer Tom Chandler scoffs at Shelton:

Great. She has a list (“he spat”).

So now the goal of middle school English is to train people to excel at the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest (“he derided”)?

I read a lot of books to my little girls. The “writers” who use anything but “said” have been banned from our house (“he lectured”).

Those writers are, in fact, going to hell (“he hoped”).

His children must have missed out on the books of J.K. Rowling (“'Viktor!’ she shrieked”) and C.S. Lewis (“'Tubs and tortoiseshells,’ exclaimed Trumpkin”).

Nevertheless, Lewis prefers plain old said, as does most journalistic writing.The demand that writers find ostentatious synonyms for said violates one of the late Elmore Leonard’s 10 precepts for authors.

As Leonard once wrote, “The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,’ and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.”

(Leonard’s advice itself is controversial, reducing some writers to paroxysms of helpless fury. Then again, his list also inspired The Guardian to round up a fantastic collection of tips from famous writers.)

Ragan Communications Executive Editor Rob Reinalda prefers the “clear and unobtrusive” attributive say (says, said).

“The reader knows there’s attribution and focuses on what has been said (and who has said it) rather than whatever 'clever’ way the writer tries to frame it,” he says. “If someone shrieks or bellows or whispers something, that’s significant. One needn’t suggest, explain, offer, quip or any other such variation.”

'Howled the CEO’?

Some authors love even truly dead words. The poet Ezra Pound celebrated archaisms, as in this verse from his “Cantos”: “Wild goose follows the sun-bird,/ in mountains; salt, copper, coral,/ dead words out of fashion.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with boring prose isn’t the use of a plainspoken vocabulary, but that writers aren’t finding interesting topics in the first place. If you’re filling your intranet with CEO interviews urging your associates to give 110 percent, no amount of “he howled” or “she cackled” will liven up your stories.

Then again, as writers who don’t spend our nights grading middle school prose, perhaps we’re taking the campaign to bury dead words too gravely.

One school district official told the Journal that the assignment was “a lighthearted project where kids have to explore more expressive ways to say words such as 'said,’ 'good,’ or 'bad.’”

That’s a good thing, I say.

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