I Thought Writing More is Directly Proportional To My Vocabulary| I was Wrong!
By: Hamza Ahmed
Tags: Creative Writing, Writing, Content Writing

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A friend of mine who also happens to be a writer or an aspiring writer, I should say, once told me he was struggling to write more than a thousand words a day because he lacked vocabulary for it. I had the same notion then. But as I grew as a writer ( I still don’t claim to be an extraordinary or expert writer ), I learnt that writing more is not about having an ocean of vocabulary.

Of course, you must work on your vocabulary ( especially if you are not native). I’m not undervaluing the importance of vocabulary in writing, but my point is if you think you writing more is directly proportional to the number of English words you know, then you are wrong.

Writing is all about ideas, the irresistible urge to say something, to show the world that you have something to write that’s worth reading.

I know, some of you’d say corporate writing doesn’t work this way. Your writing must bring traffic to their website, conversions, leads and much more. After all, they don’t pay us to share self-help stuff.

But again, my notion remains the same. Whether you are writing for the sake of sharing your idea or to promote a product, writing more depends on your creativity and how you replenish it by taking small breaks.

When I landed my first in-house writing job, I was over the moon. It was like a dream coming true. Having a technical background and just recently developed interest in writing and reading, I never thought I’d make money by writing. Though I was paid less than $150 for writing 3000 words daily, it was enough for me.

But it turned out to be a complete fiasco!!!

I left the job after a week. I was hardly writing 2000 words each day. They were OK with that — but I wasn’t!

Just a piece of advice for agencies: When you are hiring a fresh writing/internee, don’t ask him/her to write more than 1000 words a day.

Do you think I lacked vocabulary for writing? No, absolutely not.

I have maintained at least 4–5 journals ( each having more than 1000 common and advanced English words). I revise those journals weekly.

Even during that small tenure, my manager would tell me to write in simple words, “If people can’t understand our services why would they buy them?”

And he was right. I was writing not to sell or provide solutions but tout my English vocabulary — so stupid of me!

A couple of months ago I had an experience of working with an English woman on Fiver. She runs an agency that takes people to famous hiking places in Asia.

She hired me for a COPYWRITING task. To be honest, I was nervous. Her company was not a small one and I had to write the About Us Page, a couple of Taglines, and text that’d go under the logo.

To impress her, I wrote the About Us page using advanced vocabulary. And it turned out that even she had to Google the meanings of some words. She then asked me to write it in easy words, that everyone would be able to understand.

This was another incident where I learnt advanced vocabulary might look good when you are writing a research paper, but such vocabulary would mar your web copy — unless you are touting an advanced English language course.

So, if you are trying to stretch your limits of writing, the only way is to read more and, of course, write more. While reading, you can mark 10 new words you covered that day and write their meanings with two example sentences in a journal — I have been doing this practice for two years and it really works.

Another important advice I’d like to give here is don’t write a 1000-word article in one go. Writers who write without breaks get drained quickly. Writing is all about ideas and to generate more ideas you must not sit idle in front of the computer.

Take small breaks — Podmore technique is very useful. These breaks will help you to return to your unfinished craft with new ideas and a relatively fresh mind.

Takeaway

Not having ample vocabulary is often the excuse I hear from fellow writers. But if you have a great idea, then vocabulary should be a small issue — the world’s famous authors didn’t have Google, yet they manage to produce in surplus. With so many dictionaries available, lack of vocabulary shouldn’t be an excuse anymore. If you really have something to say, just start writing. You’ll find appropriate words along the way!