Tuesday, May 20, 2025

misused piece of writing advice

Stephen King’s most misused piece of writing advice

A thesaurus isn’t for finding fancy words; it’s a resource to help you keep your rhythm.

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Big Think Books

May 19, 2025

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If you’ve spent any time learning the craft of writing, you’ve undoubtedly heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. You must know the rules to break them. And never, ever start a sentence with a conjunction.

One such “rule” that has always baffled me is the ban against writing with a thesaurus. I’ve heard it from fellow writers and English professors. I have friends who won’t touch one even to scratch out the occasional email or tweet. But the incarnation of this bad advice that has made the rounds online more than any other has to be Stephen King’s take:

“[T]hrow your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

In King’s defense, taken in its original context, this sound bite may have been a recommendation to avoid using a thesaurus or other reference books when writing a first draft. Fair enough; however, the quote has long since traveled afield from that context and is often misused to suggest that there is no room for a thesaurus anywhere in a writer’s toolkit — a misuse King’s unnecessary hyperbole does nothing to dissuade readers from adopting.

And that is nonsense (also bunkum, hooey, hogwash, twaddle, and poppycock). A thesaurus a treasure trove of words cataloged with a librarian’s exactness to help writers compose the best phrase to express their ideas and thoughts. In fact, the word thesaurus comes from the Greek thēsauros, meaning “a treasury or storehouse.” But like any treasure, we only derive its full value if we understand how to spend it wisely.

How not to use a thesaurus

When people cite this bad advice, more often than not, they are actually warning against a specific misapplication: when a writer uses a thesaurus to look up a $10 Latinism when dime-store English will suffice. This is typical of writers afraid that an everyday word isn’t sophisticated enough to impress. The result is those sentences that describe an apartment as luxuriant when luxurious is the better choice or claim a new therapy will “bring a cessation to the smoking habit” instead of “help smokers quit.”

I agree a thesaurus can be a box-and-stick trap for the inattentive — a trap many writers, myself included, have sprung after being enticed by the brassy gleam of a fancy word. I also agree that new writers can be especially tempted. But these facts don’t require chucking a thesaurus into the wastebasket or implying that using one is a lazy cheat. A simple warning to tread carefully will suffice.

For a more helpful and nuanced take, consider Steven Pinker’s version in The Sense of Style (2015): “I write with a thesaurus, mindful of the advice I once read in a bicycle repair manual on how to squeeze a dent out of a rim with Vise-Grip pliers: ‘Do not get carried away with the destructive potential of this tool.’”

A case of synonymomania

Another fear driving writers toward thesaurus misuse is yet another writing myth passed around uncritically as gospel: Never use the same word twice in a sentence, paragraph, or page. (The length varies depending on who’s doling out the advice.)

H.W. Fowler sarcastically called this the rule of “elegant variation.” Theodore Bernstein referred to it as “monologophobia,” the fear of repeating the same word, which can lead to a chronic case of “synonymomania,” or the compulsion to “call a spade successively a garden implement.” Whatever the label, this rule sends writers scampering to their thesaurus to needlessly find a synonym — any synonym! — to avoid such sinful repetition.

“[The] mechanical substitution of synonyms may make a bad situation worse,” Bernstein writes in The Careful Writer. “It is particularly objectionable if the synonym is the one that falls strangely on the ear or eye: calling a snowfall a descent, calling gold the yellow metal, calling charcoal the ancient black substance. Repetition of the word is better than these strained synonyms. Often a pronoun is a good remedy, and sometimes no word at all is required.”

Pinker backs up Fowler and Bernstein here. He notes that when two different words are used to describe the same thing, readers will sometimes believe they refer to two different things. Using the same word or a pronoun helps the reader keep track of a paragraph’s actors and actions without tedium or bewildered backtracking.

That’s not to say that all repetition is advisable. Pinker adds that if the repetition trips up the reader, sounds monotonous, or potentially misleads, then variation becomes necessary. This clarification takes us to the first proper use of a thesaurus: finding your rhythm.

Author Vladimir Nabokov in Rom while working on the screenplay of *Lolita*. Nabokov would regularly experiment with his wording to find the right rhythm of a phrase or sentence. (Credit: Getty Images / Wikimedia) Commons)

How to use a thesaurus to improve your writing

Novelist Martin Amis reaches for his thesaurus when he finds a word has thrown off his rhythm. Perhaps it has created unintentional alliteration, or the syllable count has led a phrase to stop short of pleasing, or a prefix-suffix pairing has bonked together with an audible thud. Whatever the case, Amis will use a thesaurus to find a similar word that helps the sentence “maintain its rhythmical integrity.”

One of his guides for this strategy is novelist Vladimir Nabokov, a writer praised for his lyrical, sometimes disturbing, prose. As Amis shared in an interview, Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading was originally titled Invitation to an Execution. However, the unintentional rhyme rang ugly to Nabokov, so he selected a synonym that retained the meaning while sounding more melodic.

“It takes a long time, sometimes, to get your sentence right, rhythmically, and to clear the main words in it from misuse,” Amis said. “And all you’re winning is the respect of other serious writers. But I think that any amount of effort is worth it for that.”

A thesaurus can also serve as a phrase tuner, a tool for exploring different words to find the one that strikes the perfect chord. For example, I could have written above that prefix-suffix pairings hit, slammed, crashed, knocked, smashed, walloped, or hammered into each other. A thesaurus offers no shortage of options, each booming with distinct connotations and associations. I chose bonked because it embodied the clumsy and accidental vibe I was going for.

“The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation.”
Steven Pinker

And despite my jab at $10 Latinism earlier, there are times when a writer wants to review a thesaurus for a word atypical of workaday English. Courtesy of Pinker, here’s an example from Margalit Fox’s obituary of fellow journalist Mike McGrady: “Naked Came the Stranger was written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.”

Straight from the Latin, bibulous means “fond of alcohol,” and again, any thesaurus will offer up plenty of alternatives: drunk, tipsy, soused, inebriated, and pickled. Pinker suggests bibulous is the best choice because of its playfulness. Those repetitive B’s sound fun and bring to mind the party-minded phonemes shared with babbling and bubbly.

Note how Fox’s use of the word in the sentence suggests she wasn’t trying to show off or appease the monologophobics. Read it aloud, and feel how it enlivens her prose with a surprise ending that perfectly captures the scene’s idea, tone, and rhythm. Sure, it’s possible she had bibulous top of mind while she was writing. No one can know. But she could have discovered it in her thesaurus just as easily.

Finding your own rhythm

Of course, a different reader might feel Fox’s use of bibulous to be show-offy. Someone out there may prefer Invitation to an Execution. And I’m sure many readers will take issue with my word choices in this article. As with any craft, writing is more about discovering your rhythm and voice than following a set of paint-by-number rules.

A final anecdote for the road: In On Writing Well (1976), William Zinsser shares a time he wrote a sentence his editor disliked. It was, “They don’t look like cities that get visited by many visiting artists.” His editor wanted to revise the sentence to remove the second “visiting” (a case of monologophobia, perhaps?). But Zinsser stood firm. He wanted the cadence of that repetition. After a prolonged argument, his editor relented.

“If you allow your distinctiveness to be edited out, you will lose one of your main virtues,” Zinsser writes of the experience.

When used properly, a thesaurus can help you support your distinctiveness — especially when paired with a top-shelf dictionary for looking up those subtle differences between synonyms. When used improperly, it can mask your distinctiveness behind the words you think others want to hear. Either way, a proscription against such a handy writing tool is silly. Rather than throwing yours in the wastebasket, take the time to learn how to use it properly instead.

This article was first published on Big Think in February 2023. It was updated in May 2025.