How Many Ways Can You Say the Same Thing?

Being able to say one thing in several different ways is a useful skill. When we tell a story orally, we usually do this automatically. We'll say a sentence that uses a big word, then say the same sentence again using simple words. "When the king heard the news, he was seething. He was incredibly angry." We do this to make sure that everybody listening understands what's going on.

For that same reason, this skill is also quite useful for teaching. I can't tell how many times I have sat in a classroom, hearing a teacher try to explain a concept to a student using the same words over and over again. The teacher didn't know how to explain it with any other words, but those words had no meaning to the student. On occasion, I have said the same thing in a different way and fixed the problem.

This also makes story writing much easier, usually in the editing stages. Sometimes a sentence just doesn't sound right. It screws up the flow of the piece and becomes a chore for the reader. The simple method is to just cut it out, but if the information is necessary, then you'll need to find a new way to say it.

There are several ways to say the same thing. The easiest way is to change the word order. Because of the magic of prepositional phrases, you can stick them anywhere in the sentence - beginning, middle, or end. Maybe it's easier to say "He stood over there" instead of "Over there, he stood." Sometimes you use most of the same words, but play with grammatical structures. That's when you turn "It was the red ball that I saw my friend I knew from middle school holding" into "It was the red ball my friend was holding. I had known him since middle school." The most drastic method to use completely new words. It's drastic, but is often the best and easiest method. Sometimes your words or thoughts are so jumbled that there is no good way to manipulate what you have. Start fresh and try it again.

Give yourself a writing exercise. Write enough to fill a page. Find the sentence that sounds the most awkward and rewrite it in 5 different ways. Then take the clunkiest paragraph and rewrite it 3 different ways. Finally, delete the page completely and rewrite. Don't try to rewrite it from memory, though. Recreate the essence, the idea, of the piece. Then you will be able to rewrite much better. You will be a better writer for it and you will be quite prepared for the next time that you wrote something you love and your computer crashes or you spill coffee on the paper.