What Words Are You Conscious Of?

A writer friend once asked me a question about the words I use. I can't remember the exact wording anymore, but it made me think about which words I use too much. For me, that means, what words am I conscious of using? It's a weird question, but I like it.

Some words we use hundreds of times a day without thinking about it. Probably 90% of the words you'll ever read in my posts you don't really think about. They have a meaning, and you think about the meaning they have, but not about the word itself. When do you start noticing words?

For me, I only notice words when they either break the rhythm of a line, are not in my lexicon, or are used too much. The last one is most interesting, because there are exceptions to it. The more common a word is, the more you can use it without flaw. Personal pronouns you almost never have to worry about. The same is true for conjunctions and other grammar words (as opposed to content words). But the less common a word is, the more conscious we become of the word when used regularly.

There is one word that I use too much, and it is "start". My prose, especially my first drafts, are thoroughly littered with people who "started to" do something. Nobody does any actions; they just start them. You would think that my stories involve a bunch of people who try to do things and are constantly interrupted (since the only time you should say that a character started to do something is if they didn't finish it). And yet, despite knowing this, I do it constantly. While the average high school or college writer spends most of their revision time removing passive tense, I spend most of it removing "starts".

The only other word I'm conscious of is "I". Although I can use "I" all the time and it is unlikely that anyone will notice it, I don't like starting paragraphs with it. Granted, I do it a lot. Almost every post in Cheff Salad has at least one paragraph that starts with "I", mostly because it's me talking in first person about what I think, so there's no reason to mince words. But if every paragraph starts with "I", it makes me uncomfortable, like I need to find some variation.

One of the interesting side-effects to the question, "what words are you conscious of", is that you see that words are not simply words. We become very aware of the difference between grammar words and content words, and beyond that, some kind of value that every word has which represents how much space there must be before we are comfortable seeing it again. But even more, we also see that words exist not on their own, but in a context that affects this value.

I am endlessly in love with words, language, and communication. This question is a doorway to more deeply explore and understand these things. I am very grateful to have pondered it over the years, and I hope other authors ponder it too, and find their own answers from the process.