I’ve been spending a lot of time with my head stuck in the dictionary and thesaurus recently, and I happened to see the episode of friends where Joey writes a letter. It made me chuckle so I had to share it:
Every writers best friend is a thesaurus, but the clip above, reminded me of a lesson I learnt a long time ago about over using the thesaurus. Some of the best writing is simple writing. Simple writing that is descriptive, but not overly flowery. There is a danger in using the thesaurus that we become Joey, and end up not actually saying what we mean, or worse, affecting the flow of our writing. I have done the latter. Affected the flow of my writing because I just couldn’t find the right word, and in the end I had to strip out all the words and resort to re writing chunks of paragraphs.
The synonym finders I tend to use online are:
If anyone has any other useful sites for synonyms let me know 🙂
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