18 Common Words That You Should Replace in Your Writing. It’s a familiar scene: you’re slumped over your keyboard or notebook, obsessing over your character. While we tend to agonize over everything from structure to backstory, it’s important to weigh how you write something too. A perfectly constructed world is flat on the page if you use feeble, common words. When you’re finished constructing your perfectly balanced world, do your writing a favor and take another pass to weed out these 18 haggard words. Good High on any list of most used English words is “good.” While this word may appear to be the perfect adjective for nearly anything, that is precisely what makes it so vague. Try getting more specific. New Another of the common words in English is “new.” Long Much like “new,” “long” is spent, yet it doesn’t always register as such while you’re writing.
Old “Old” is certainly one of those common words that means more to readers if you’re specific about how old a subject is. Right Different Small Large Next Young Never Things All Feel Seem Almost Just Went. 600 Other Ways To Say Common Things: Improving Student Vocabulary - Your students are bright, but they don’t always sound like it. Their diction is full of cliche and emaciated language that doesn’t reflect their inner voice, nor does it indicate their vocabulary level. You want your students to use specific language that demonstrates intended meaning rather than the first word that popped into their head, but you want to do more than hand them a thesaurus and tell them to “figure it out.”
While the following graphics aren’t going to make that happen, they can certainly play a role if posted to your classroom blog, shared on a student-teacher pinterest page, hung on a classroom wall, or reformatted, printed, hole-punched, and stored in a student binder.