Diction.

In Chapter 6, "Diction," Trimble exhorts writers to pay attention to several qualities of word choice. Which advice feel familiar (or  perhaps necessary) for you to apply to your own writing?

     Trimble introduces the chapter with the topics "Conciseness" and "Vigorous Verbs" which both already give advice that I feel is necessary for my own writing. Due to typical high school assignments, I tend to have a bad habit of writing in the passive voice and using more words than necessary. Trimble states how one must learn how to respect words and to be concise, but also strong but selecting a sufficient, strong word. "Less is more" (Trimble, 49) is definitely something I can begin thinking about to improve my writing. Trimble also advises the reader (me) to remember that "Active verbs move us forward; passive verbs move us backward. Active verbs give us the actor up front; passive verbs make us wait to learn the actor" (Trimble, 50). I can start using the active voice more and remember to assign responsibility for an action. The last topic Trimble addresses is "Freshness," describing how a writer needs to be able to surprise the reader; a writer should write creatively with selective adjectives and verbs. This is another element I can apply to my writing (so basically, the entire chapter is helpful to my writing). I think all of the qualities that Trimble mentions a writer should pay attention to in this chapter will be essential to improving my writing this semester (I already tried to follow his advice while writing this blog post!).