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Expand your English skills: Synonyms

Expand your English skills

— Saif Alhobishi

If you are looking for ways to improve upon your writing skills start by learning some new synonyms. The correct use of synonyms can transform your writing from boring to exciting or from repetitive to imaginative.

One activity that I use to build vocabulary is this: I say a word or expression, and then my students work together to list as many synonyms of that word as they can. When they’ve finished, I choose how to continue. Either they get out a thesaurus and look for other, new synonyms, or they make a similar list in their native language and we work on translating them into English together. It may seem silly to teach six ways to say the same thing instead of teaching six different things, one way each, but synonyms are actually more useful than many people realize.

• Synonym: a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another in the language, for example a synonym for “happy” is “elated”.

Words often have many different synonyms. For example, “drab”, “ebony”, “murky”, “dull” and “shady” are all synonyms for “dark”. You can make your writing much more captivating by choosing lively synonyms for the words in your sentences. For example instead of saying, “His hair was dark”, you can say “His hair was inky”.

• A thesaurus will give you a long list of synonyms for a word and can be very helpful to find appropriate synonyms for your writing. One thing to be careful of when using a thesaurus is that some words have slightly different meanings or are meant to be used in different ways.

In writing, especially creative-writing, repeating the same words numerous times can make writing dull or uninteresting. Replacing a word with an equivalent one, perhaps even a more specific one, can improve how you are communicating your ideas.

The use of synonyms also helps to make your writing more vivid and to create a more intriguing image in the mind of the reader. What images do you see in your mind when you read the following sentences; “the water in the pond was dark”, “the water in the pond was murky”. Does the second sentence create a more interesting image for you? The word “murky” gives a more exciting and vivid description of the appearance of the pond water.