This tutorial is brought to you by one of the authors of Rebuising Professional Writing. Now in its third edition, my students call me Dr. Kim. The publishers made this video available under a Creative Commons license. For more information, contact ParlayPress.com. Remember you can use the pause button at any time, and if you see shadows or something weird on the screen, try changing your playback quality settings. The view you see here includes everything you might learn about professional writing in my tutorials. There are others that help you understand content development, organization, style, and mechanics. As well as the rhetorical context that determines which content organization or style is going to be effective in a specific situation. Although your primary interest in this tutorial is the message itself, effective style can only be judged by taking into account the writer's purpose and audience. If you haven't listened to this tutorial's on rhetorical context yet, especially the one on audience, I encourage you to. This tutorial focuses on one area of style in professional writing, word choice. I'm certain you've heard about word choice before. You may not, however, have thought about its importance in the workplace. My goal is to get you thinking about its impact within a professional context, and to explain how to choose appropriate wording in your own writing. We'll be considering the style of a recommendation report sent to a client. The quality in the video makes it impossible for you to read the text on the screen. If you're a student using our book, your instructor can provide a copy, or you can always download one at proswrite.com. This report was written by a technology consultant who was hired by the client, that's a commercial brewing company, to identify a device to protect the company's computer network. The audience for the report is made up of managers at the brewing company. They're non-experts, that's why they hired the writer, and they're going to be somewhat skeptical of or sensitive to the writer's message. That means the writer has to increase the reader's readiness by providing both informative and persuasive information. My task in this tutorial is to explain how to avoid word choice problems that interfere with getting readers to accept a message. I also hope to persuade you that avoiding style problems is important in this report. Let's get started. There are six sources of word choice problems. Connotation is the first source. Look at the sentence from the original version of the report. The word peril denotes the same meaning as danger or risk, but also connotes the sense of life and death. It's used in this sentence from the recommendation report, therefore, is inappropriate because the loss of data is not equivalent to the loss of life. In the revised version of the sentence, the use of risk is more accurate and creates a more appropriate style for the writer's purpose and the audience's reaction to the writer's message. When professional writers choose words with inappropriate connotations, their readers may be distracted by the connotation rather than focused on the writer's intended meaning. The second source of word choice problems is jargon. I've already noted that the readers of the recommendation report are non-experts about the technology. That's why they need the report. Consider the vocabulary in the original sentence shown here. Do you recognize any terms that a non-expert might be unfamiliar with? How about land? It's an acronym, which makes it jargon, and might not be understood by all of the report's readers. So, the revised version of the sentence is more effective because it appropriately spells out the meaning of the acronym. From now on in the report, the writer has increased the reader's expertise so the acronym can be used with some reasonable expectation that readers will understand it. Correctly identifying the audience's level of knowledge is the key to avoiding problems with jargon. The third source of word choice problems is either slang or idioms. Note that the original sentence from the recommendation report shown here contains an idiom, noise on the line. It's derived from a rather old-fashioned situation in which audio problems occurred on hardwired and shared telephone lines. However, the term is not being used literally in this report because there are not necessarily physical lines connecting the equipment referred to by the writer. While most native English speakers might correctly infer the accurate meaning of this vocabulary, it's likely to create uncertainty for a few and for many non-native speakers of English. The revised version of the sentence is more effective because it replaces the idiom with the word interference, which is accurate for any reader. The fourth source of word choice problems is subcategorization. We'll focus on one subcategory of English verbs requiring a noun as direct object. That means they're categorized not only as verbs, but more specifically as transitive verbs. Consider the original sentence from the recommendation report shown here. Note that the verb purchase appears without a direct object that creates a subcategorization problem. Business readers are likely to notice something sounds funny and to make attributions about the writer's knowledge of English or his or her professionalism. Clearly, this distracts the reader from attending to the content of the message. It creates inefficiency. In contrast, in the revised version of the sentence, the writer provides the direct object and avoids the problem, and most importantly, the distraction. The fifth source of word choice problems is called selectional restriction. Some English verbs not only require a noun as direct object, they require a noun with specific qualities. Here, we see the sentence we just reviewed, which has a subcategorization problem because the verb purchase is not followed by a direct object. Note, however, that in the incorrectly revised version a noun does appear as direct object. See this idea? But a word choice problem involving the verb remains. This time, the problem is not one of verb subcategorization, but one of selectional restrictions for the verb. As I noted a few moments ago, business readers are likely to notice something sounds funny and to be distracted from the content of the message. The distraction is eliminated in the correctly revised sentence when the noun product is used as direct object with the verb purchase. So what's the difference between the noun's idea and product? If you recognize that idea is abstract while product is concrete, you correctly identified the selection restriction for the English verb purchase. It requires a concrete noun as direct object. The sixth and final source of word choice problems is confusing word pairs. The original sentence shown here includes a word that's been confused with its pair. Can you spot it? In the revised version of the sentence, the correct word, spelled T-O-O, has replaced its hominem T-O. Now it's time to check your understanding of tone by revising a sentence you haven't seen before. The question asks that you revise the sentence to fix the word choice problem. Pause the recording and look at the sample sentence from a report for human resource professionals. You should have recognized there's something funny about the use of very compensation here, and that you can fix the problem by deleting compensation. After studying the content in this tutorial, you should be able to diagnose as well as correct the problem. Either the verb very doesn't allow a direct object, or it doesn't allow one with the qualities of the noun compensation. Replacing compensation with a different noun, for example, damages, doesn't solve the problem with the use of very. So the problem here is not a restriction on the type of noun that can serve as direct object. We can determine the problem as one of subcategorization. In other words, the verb very does not allow a direct object. To help you understand how to avoid word choice problems, I've been referring to a recommendation report from a technology consultant to a commercial brewing company. The company's managers are more likely to be ready to accept the consultant's recommendation if the writer uses accurate, clear, and professional vocabulary. This aspect of style enhances the effectiveness of the message by creating a more accurate one, as well as a more professional tone. It may also increase efficiency if readers spend less time and effort puzzling over the writer's meaning, or worse yet, professionalism. As with most aspects of style, changes in word choice may be small when considering a single example. Think about the use of TO instead of TO. However small, careful use of vocabulary is significant when you consider its impact within an entire document written for an audience with low readiness to accept a message. As I've said before, successful professionals do whatever they can to get their message across to readers.