Here’s How to Improve Your Writing — Avoid ‘Yup-So’ Words
By: Jim Latham
Tags: Writing Advice, Short Story Writing, Nonfiction, Writing, Writing Tips

Equatorial is not a yup-so word

My phone autocorrects my daughter’s name to liquor, so I quite often, and quite unknowingly end up sending somewhat worrying messages to my parents. For example:

I was talking to Liquor while driving home yesterday… I never would have gotten the chainsaw running without Liquor’s help.

I am sure we all have our favorite and/or most-hated autocorrect stories — and there’s probably a webpage or publication devoted to collecting these sorts of gems.

Last week, though, autocorrect coined what I think is a very useful term for us writers.

As a bonus, it’s new, so I don’t think Barry knows it yet.

I was workshopping a 700-word travel piece about a boozy encounter I had with a hungry Ugandan hippo with another of my writing friends, Cami. Cami was sending me her comments in a series of text messages, one of which read:

You used equatorial twice. It’s not a yup-so word.

Yup-so immediately conjured up images of stolid Midwestern farmers having endless conversations about the weather while staring out over endless, flat acres of soybean fields.

And equatorial is certainly not the type of common word that is going to nestle unobtrusively in a four-minute read, whether there is a hippo involved or not.

Cami has been working as a writer and editor for years, so I assumed yup-so was another piece of writing vocabulary, like inciting incident. In my mind, I had just learned a great term to describe bland, commonly used words.

I was psyched. So psyched I texted back saying how much I liked yup-so.

Cami replied:

Huh?

Then, a moment later:

Oh. Stupid autocorrect.

So yup-so wasn’t a piece of writing lingo. Autocorrect had coined what I felt was a great term for bland, commonly used words.

I texted back:

In context it’s perfect. Equatorial is not a yup-so word.

From there I finished my revisions of the hungry hippo story and started working a poem which had been lingering on my hard drive for years. That led to reading this article about free verse poetry by Christina M. Ward.

It’s a great article and includes a wonderful example illustrating the difference between prose, prose with line breaks, and free verse poetry. While discussing her example, Ms. Ward notes that the prose sentence with line breaks,

clearly appears to be more like a free verse poem. But, there are too many words and too few “poetic” ones. The language is clear but has no depth, no “poetic” experience for the reader. — quote from What Makes a Free Verse Poem by Christina M. Ward.

When I read that I thought to myself that yup-so might improve this bit of advice slightly, by providing some contrast. Here is the same quote, with yup-so added in bold:

clearly appears to be more like a free verse poem. But, there are too many yup-so words and too few “poetic” ones. The language is clear but has no depth, no “poetic” experience for the reader. — quote from What Makes a Free Verse Poem by Christina M. Ward with one word added.

Reading it over now, inserting yup-so appears to change the advice slightly by watering down the suggestion to cut the overall number of words. Plus, I’ve read enough of Ms. Ward’s poetry to know that she certainly doesn’t need any help from me. So I am expressly not saying she should change her article.

But I hope I’ve illustrated how yup-so might be used in a conversation about writing.