Brenda’s Reviews > Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language & Style > Status Update

These past few pages have gotten me thinking about naming things. I've always had trouble with that but now I'm thinking of playing with words a bit.

I'm finding that I have trouble reading through the chapters that don't interest me as much even if they contain useful information.

I don't know if the chapter on tropes was terribly irritating or if I've just burned myself out reading it for the moment. I'm gonna take a break and read something else for a while.

I wish this one, on diction, had gone right after the one on color because that's when I made the leap that this chapter deals with. I was already considering a characters diction but the chapter on tense got in the way of that leap bridging the chapter on color and the chapter on diction.

This chapter on tense was difficult for me to get. That might be because I had trouble with it as a young child just learning the use of language but I would have definitely appreciated examples to some of the interesting uses of tense he talked about. As it is, I'm left with an incomplete picture of what he was trying to show me.

Slowing down to really absorb this stuff. This chapter is the one that has had me thinking the most. I'd never thought about how the characters I write would describe colors. Now, I have another tool to really give a scene the right mood for a certain character. All this time I've been so focused on giving the scene the mood I wanted rather than the mood the character would perceive while living it.

So, I'm getting the feeling that many writers have word synesthesia of some sort or other from reading this book.

I liked the suggestion for building vocabulary in this chapter. My approach to vocabulary building is to read more but I'll give these word-a-day things a try.

That was a fun chapter but it makes me realize that this book was written with the audience of the time of its publication in mind.

This page contains a neat vocabulary stretching activity.