Friday 26 March 2010

Synonym bypass

I don't have great pretensions as a writer. At work, I wrote "Social Enquiry Reports" on offenders and their situations to the Courts. It was usually serious stuff, and attention to detail was important. It was good to write with a certain style, simply to put a point across well and memorably. Judges are deluged with paperwork, so it's important to write with some flair, just to make sure your points are noted.

Nowadays, I find it's all gone to hell in a handbasket. I find myself repeating words and phrases as I write, and I'm always going back to edit out too many uses of the same word or phrase. I really admire those of you who have produced saleable written work whilst afflicted by this bloody illness. I'm sure you all have as many dry-ups and mental blocks as I do, along with moments of profound stupidity when nothing on the screen actually makes sense for a while. Go ME writers, I salute you. Now, where was I?

4 comments:

  1. Isn't that the truth - the edit button is my best friend!

    I'm glad you found my blog so I could find this one :)

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  2. Yeah, the cognitive dysfunction is the pits.

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  3. You may wonder how I wrote a book with cognitive dysfunction as my constant companion. The answer is slowly, very slowly. Some days, all I could write was a paragraph. And there were times when I didn't write anything for months. One thing that helped with the cognitive dysfunction was to put away what I wrote and come back to edit it weeks later. It was much easier to see the difficulties, reading it anew like that. Oh and the Thesaurus was my friend -- great for those moment when your brain just wants to repeat the same word over and over!

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