"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.
Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point.
When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally.
Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.
Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.
This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.
A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.
Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).
Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.
An author's word choices can certainly fail to convey intended meaning, or convey it too slowly because they are too obscure or are a mismatch for the the intended audience — that is just falling off the other side of the good writing tightrope.
At technical paper is an example where the audience expects to see proper technical names and terms of art. Those terms will slow down a general reader who will be annoyed by the "jargon" but it would annoy every academic or professional if the "jargon" were edited out for less precise and more everyday words. And vice versa for the same topic published in a general interest magazine.
So, an important question is whether you are part of the intended audience.
Brevity is the soul of good communication.
"He waddled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
[edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.
Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).
You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.)
You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker, because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are missing, too.
And by “you can’t”, I mean “you absolutely can, but you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and take care to use the available tools to substitute for the missing signalling channels”.
In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.
Surely you aren't taking a government at its word on a politically charged case? Need we trudge out the Chicago 7 again?
And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.
I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke, until true believers started showing up and thinking we believed too. Not a joke anymore...
4chan was created in 2003. Trump's first bid for the Presidency was an attempt at the Reform Party nomination dropped early in the primary season—in 2000, the one cycle when that party had access to federal matching funds but wasn't effectively a vehicle for H. Ross Perot. Another Trump bid was a recurring topic of discussion in serious, if speculative, contexts ever since (and, for that matter, the idea of a Trump presidential run had been even before the first bid, back to the 1980s, as I recall.) It certainly is not an idea that first emerged as a 4chan joke.
Also, thank you for encouraging me to read the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Reform_Party_presidential....
Conveying meaning is the whole problem here. An unexpected word choice is a neon sign saying "This is important!" and it disappoints the reader if it is not.
People shouldn't use "strides" just because "walked" is boring. They should use "strides" when it's meaningful in the context of the story.
"You probably remember your English teacher saying 'the word 'said' is boring, use something different. Yes, find something else, if it makes more sense. But the word 'said' is a perfectly good word."
But a different scene might be better with the pedestrian "walk". Imagine that the main character enters the woman's office with an ostentatious bouquet of flowers. In that scene, maybe the emphasis is on the flowers or on the reaction of the woman or her co-workers. In the scene, a simple "he walked" might work best.
> Well, also he will notice in the course of time, as his reading goes on, that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
But also:
> Unconsciously he accustoms himself to writing short sentences as a rule. At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole.
"God rest ye merry gentlemen" changes in tone and meaning depending on where you put the comma in that sentence.
I would not understand the last two sentences. Sidle? Tromp? I don't think I've seen these words enough times for them to register in my mind.
"Strode", I would probably understand after a few seconds of squeezing my brain. I mean, I sort of know "stride", but not as an action someone would take. Rather as the number of bytes a row of pixels takes in a pixel buffer. I would have to extrapolate what the original "daily English" equivalent must have been.
Bad writers, of course, pick a word to make them seem smarter (which, of course, often fails). That's what the OP was complaining about: using a fancy word just to impress.
But "stride" is not just a fancy version of "walk". When a person strides they are taking big steps; their head is held high, and they are confident in who they are and where they're going.
"Sidle" is the opposite. A person who sidles is timid and meek; they walk slowly, or maybe sideways, hoping that no one will notice them.
And "tromp," of course, sounds like something heavy and dour. A person who tromps stamps their feet with every step; you hear them coming. They are angry or maybe clumsy and graceless.
Very true. Take this passage:
‘I am called Strider,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Master – Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.’
In an early draft Tolkien used a different word as the character was originally a hobbit, rather than a long-legged Ranger:
‘I’m Trotter,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr — Hill, if old Barnabas had your name right?’
The bulk of that was the History of Middle Earth of which a few volumes cover LoTR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_The_Lord_of_the...
You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words
In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or "parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know of the cuff what the second one means
People either know, look it up or figure it out via context
I can see the appeal in, perhaps, technical writing but even there, I feel that there's room to make the prose more colourful.
The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
> The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
I am also not a native English speaker, but I got to know the verb to "to stride" from The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is originally introduced under the name "Strider":
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid=132...
"Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor."
(native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)
Open a collegiate dictionary to a series of random pages, checking the first word to see if you can give any vague definition of it. A fluent speaker who doesn't read literature will likely be able to for fewer than 1/4th of them. A decent literary vocabulary would know ~2/3 or more imo.
I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
For instance Mark Twain is basically full of endless amazing quotes with lovely nuance, yet in contemporary times how many people would miss the meaning in a statement like "Prosperity is the best protector of principle"? I can already see people raging over his statement, taken at face value. Downvote the classist!
The context is really necessary.
And that's what I mean in that modern writing, on the internet - though rapidly leaking into 'real life', has become highly infantilized where we assume everybody reading is an idiot, and speak accordingly which, in turn, infantilizes and 'idiotizes' our own speech, and simply makes it far more bland and less expressive.
Interestingly, this is not ubiquitous. In other cultures, including on the internet, there remains much more use of irony, and more general nuance in speech. I suspect a big part of the death of English fluency was driven by political correctness - zomg what if somebody interprets what I'm saying the wrong way!?!
[1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm
I hope ChatGPT starts writing only short sentences.
Punchy one-liners.
One thought per line.
So marketers finally realize this does not work.
And stop sending me junk emails written like this.
… though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
> strode purposefully
My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.