Linking up at Kathy's blog - BermudaOnion's Weblog today to share a couple of words discovered as I finished reading Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlen.
verisimilitude noun -the quality of seeming real
When I taught writing, .............I would often emphasize how precision in the details helps create atmosphere, character and verisimilitude; how the color of a bedroom wall, the dirt on a third-floor window, the drape of a black silk skirt can all be used to draw the reader deeper into the fictional world, a world that should be, as John Gardner advised, a "vivid and continuous dream" in the reader's mind.
expiatory adj serving to expiate (which led me to look up expiate)
expiate:
: to do something as a way to show that you are sorry about doing something bad
: to extinguish the guilt incurred by
I have never had a priest bestow absolution upon me and send me on my way with some expiatory homework: Say twelve Hail Marys.
What wondrous words have you discovered lately?
Stay Busy and Stay Happy
I knew expiatory, but not the other.
ReplyDeleteVerisimilitude seems so weird in that sentene that I love it. Oh yes, I'm always looking for the way an author adds verisimilitude in their descriptions. lol Good find Judy.
ReplyDeleteBoth of those are new to me. I think I'd have trouble saying verisimilitude in the middle of a sentence.
ReplyDelete