The ultimate trip-up for readers is homonyms. Those are words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings (and can also be pronounced differently). You throw a word at the audience like "bear" or "shower" and you can leave the reader super confused.
Usually, all we have to go on is context to make any sense of things. You read the sentence, the one before it, the one after it, and you understand what is meant. The nice thing about homonyms is that they tend to have noticeably different meanings.
The problem here is not always that the audience never figures out what's going on. The problem is that they had to take the time to figure it out. Your train of thought got completely derailed and your music came to a crashing halt. Everything you are working to create falls apart when the audience gets confused and has to figure out what you mean.
I'm not saying to never use homonyms. But when a spelling of a word has one very commonly used definition and you are using the uncommon one, you have to know what's going to happen, and you need to compensate for it.
More people use "shower" to talk about bathing, so if you want it to refer to one who shows, then build up to it. Use the word "show" and talk about people who show things. Maybe put the right sound in people's heads by pairing it with a rhyming word like "grower" so they will assume "shower" also has the long o sound.
Whatever technique you use, know that you can affect your audience, at least most of them, to read things in a desired way. Make use of that skill you have to make it happen.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment