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| Dialogue from Middlemarch, by George Eliot |
From Beginnings of Rhetoric and Composition, by Adams Hill:
A young writer sometimes loads his compositions with words that he would not naturally use in speaking or writing, words that he has caught up from a book because he thought they sounded well or were out of the common.
Reading classic works that have both breadth and depth is one of the most valuable ways to enlarge a vocabulary. But avoid using words and phrases that you haven't yet internalized enough to make your own.
[E]xpressions...that are in colloquial...use are to be preferred; even slang, the vulgar* part of the spoken language, is better than pedantic phrases, the dead or dying part of the written language.
"The writing which has least the appearance of literary manufacture," says Maria Edgeworth, "always pleases me the best."
Good authors use words like human beings, not like parrots or machines; but even good authors occasionally fall into what may be called the literary dialect.
Bookish words, bad enough in themselves, become far worse when used by one who does not know what they mean. The prevalence of such words in written work at school or college is a pretty sure sign either that the writer has nothing to say on the subject in hand or that he takes no interest in what he is writing. Regarding his composition as an irksome task, associating it with his work rather than with his play, he does not put his real self behind his pen, but relies on his remembrance of something he has read to supply him with words — and, probably, also with thoughts — which he but half understands.
He may profitably bear in mind what Dryden says in a famous passage that is as true today as it was when he wrote it:
There are many, who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother-tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practice them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and. digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners...
Prefer living to bookish words.
*Meaning, "common."
 
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