Giving Thanks: For words, linguistics, and writing

Hi there, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s November, and that means it’s time for a new series—and for this month, I decided to talk about something that’s a little more attuned to the season, this being the month of Thanksgiving, which just so happens to be my mother’s favorite holiday. I wanted to talk about something that I don’t often talk about, in that… I want to show you, why I’m thankful for some of the things that you might not have considered, when it comes to the world of writing, editing, and publishing.

Giving Thanks: For words, linguistics, and writing

This one, you might’ve been able to guess. But I want to talk about them from an angle you may not have thought of, in the past.

I’m thankful for words, not just because they’re the things my passion is based in, the thing I deal in every single day of my life, but because without them, communication, story, even life wouldn’t be the same in any way. Words are more important than we give them credit for. They can build others up, tear others down, create worlds, and destroy them. Words have a power, that people don’t often consider—and it’s that power that I’m thankful for. I’m thankful to work in a field that allows me to really see the power words have, over everything. Speak life into people, and they come alive with joy. Speak hatred, and watch as they crumple. It’s the same with story. Write your words with passion and zeal, and your readers will see the passion you poured into your work. Write them without, write them with laziness and boredom, and your readers will feel that same boredom.

So I’m thankful, for words, and for the chance to work with them, every day of my life.

I’m thankful for linguistics, too. Linguistics, to me, ties into the use of words in a way that intrigues me to no end. There’s a specific cadence to words, to language, to speech in general, that I’m always trying to capture, in my writing. You might notice a slight overuse of commas in my writing, in my attempt to make my writing read the way I want it to be spoken. Linguistics is all about sound, about how words are said and what way they’re said, and it’s one of those extremely difficult things to capture, when it comes to writing—but I’m thankful for it, because it’s a challenge, and because I do love a challenge.

So I’m thankful for linguistics, because without them, words wouldn’t make much sense.

I’m thankful for writing, perhaps most of all, of the three. I’m so extremely thankful that people started writing, at all. I’m glad that we, as a people, thought to write down our stories and catalog them. I’m glad that we no longer think of story as something to avoid, something to forget at a moment’s notice. We’re all full of story, if you think about it. Every moment of our lives could be considered a moment within a story—and that, to me, is utterly fascinating. We all exist in story, and we all exist in writing. We send emails, we post things on social media, we send text messages and write little notes to ourselves and to others, always writing, always using these little memos to define the story in which we live.

So I’m thankful for writing, and for the ability to write, to create, and to define.

That’s what we’ll be talking about, this month—things that I’m thankful for, and things that you’re probably thankful for too, though some of them you might not have really thought about before.

[love]

{Rani Divine}