Post by account_disabled on Dec 9, 2023 23:40:16 GMT -6
This post was involuntarily suggested to me by a reader, or rather by a doubt of his. Is it necessary to explain to readers the meaning of an unknown term introduced in a story? Or is it better to take that meaning for granted? If on the one hand descriptions are not very popular, is there a risk that a song will not be understood? In my opinion there is not always a valid answer, but it must be analyzed case by case and word by word. In this article I try to shed light on this problem of writing.
However, a writer's erudition and his mastery of language are always to be rewarded, never condemned. Are there any new terms? This is a question worth asking. I'm not talking about untranslatable foreign Phone Number Data words - that is, those words that have no equivalent in Italian - nor about neologisms, but about words that have long been contained in the dictionary. In that case there are no new words. They are new to those who have never read or heard them. It is impossible to know all the words in the dictionary, at least for a general reader. There are, for example, technical terms in every area, which a writer has the obligation to insert when they are needed to give credibility to what he writes. If you know a word, if you have it in mind, if you think it appropriate to use it, then use it without thinking about the reader: when the reader reads he is learning, he is not just passing the time.
When I don't know a word, I look it up in the dictionary. Deriving meaning from context Often a new term is deduced from the context of the passage we are reading. In that case the reader knows, for example, that that word indicates a fish, a plant, even if he doesn't know what it looks like. In others I happened to not be able to understand what the writer was talking about: and I mean an Italian term that I didn't know. But that was my problem, not the author's. It was my shortcoming, or ignorance of the term. Why does the writer have to use simplistic, limited language to make himself understood by everyone? Why must he give up being himself, defining his image as a writer because of lazy readers.
However, a writer's erudition and his mastery of language are always to be rewarded, never condemned. Are there any new terms? This is a question worth asking. I'm not talking about untranslatable foreign Phone Number Data words - that is, those words that have no equivalent in Italian - nor about neologisms, but about words that have long been contained in the dictionary. In that case there are no new words. They are new to those who have never read or heard them. It is impossible to know all the words in the dictionary, at least for a general reader. There are, for example, technical terms in every area, which a writer has the obligation to insert when they are needed to give credibility to what he writes. If you know a word, if you have it in mind, if you think it appropriate to use it, then use it without thinking about the reader: when the reader reads he is learning, he is not just passing the time.
When I don't know a word, I look it up in the dictionary. Deriving meaning from context Often a new term is deduced from the context of the passage we are reading. In that case the reader knows, for example, that that word indicates a fish, a plant, even if he doesn't know what it looks like. In others I happened to not be able to understand what the writer was talking about: and I mean an Italian term that I didn't know. But that was my problem, not the author's. It was my shortcoming, or ignorance of the term. Why does the writer have to use simplistic, limited language to make himself understood by everyone? Why must he give up being himself, defining his image as a writer because of lazy readers.