A New Use for Google Books

The English language is a living thing: words become obsolete, others become popular, and new ones are created. We’re all aware of this process, but have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t remember using or hearing that word very often, but now it seems to be everywhere overnight.”

Has the popularity of the word truly skyrocketed? Or were you just not paying attention before?

With Google’s Ngram Viewer, you might be able to figure it out. This nifty application—which really should come with a procrastination warning—uses texts from Google Books to graph word usage over time. You can trace a single word or phrase’s written frequency over time (hipsters got a lot of attention in the 1960s and were all but ignored in the 1980s) or you can compare several words (you’re unlikely to see either these days, but tell your friends that verily was always more popular than forsooth).

Lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, and people who simply like a good dictionary were all atwitter when the venerable Oxford English Dictionary announced its decision to add a new definition of tweet: “to  submit a post to the microblogging service known as Twitter.” (Ironically, microblog hasn't yet made the cut.) The Ngram data set only goes back to 2008, so we can’t see the jump that has almost certainly happened in the last five years and which prompted the OED to break its own rule about only adding a word after ten years of documented popular usage. Still, it was interesting to find out that tweet also experienced a heyday around 1810 but that apparently no one had much to say about birds in the 1850s.

Google Book Ngram Viewer

So What Are You Working On?

In “Draft No. 4,” a recent piece in The New Yorker, author John McPhee offers sage advice on the writing process, all the way from those first torturous days of dealing with writer’s block through to the final line-by-line edit. “So what are you working on?”, well-meaning friends and family ask. For many writers, even professionals, that can be a terrifying question. 

Lucky for us, McPhee begins with a call to take heart: “if you lack confidence in setting one word after another…if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this…you must be a writer.” “How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists?” he asks.

By extension, how could we know that something is bad? Why should we let ourselves decide that it’s all a mess, that the project is irredeemable, before we’ve gotten to the final page of that first draft? We all know that the first draft is usually the hardest. McPhee advises writers to simply “blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.” His advice echoes that of author Anne Lamott, who famously (and in more colorful language) urges writers to embrace the “shitty first draft.” The SNL Writing Guide agrees, and you can find a number of suggestions for getting through this tough stage in the Drafting section. Be prepared for this stage of writing to take the longest; McPhee estimates that he spends about four times as much time on the first draft as each subsequent draft.

After the “first awful blurting,” McPhee moves on to the issue that guides the rest of his essay: revision. “Revision,” he asserts, is “the essence of the process. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes express mail from fairyland.” At this point, he’s still focusing on what you might have heard called “global” revision or “higher order concerns." Ideas are still shifting, paragraphs are being cut or expanded, structure is still being worked out. In fact, it’s not until “Draft No. 4” that McPhee feels ready to move on to his strategies for “local” revision, or “lower order concerns.”

And he starts with boxes: boxes around words or phrases that don’t seem quite right, or words that may present an opportunity. “While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K.,” he says, “there is likely a better word…a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find it?” At first glance, McPhee seems to be recommending what writing teachers have worked long and hard to communicate: that revision is much more, and much harder, than pulling out a thesaurus. But McPhee is quick to caution us: “thesauruses are useful things...They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better.” (For more on the value of simple words, read Richard Lederer’s excellent—and appropriately short—essay “The Case for Short Words.”)

McPhee’s essay offers some useful examples of the pitfalls of developing a case of “thesaurusitis.” It’s the dictionary, he believes, that we should be reaching for instead. Thesauruses can be helpful, but “they don’t talk about the words they list.” When we’re presented with a slew of synonyms, it’s hard to decide which is truly the best fit (or, le mot juste). The dictionary, on the other hand, can provide us with not only the denotation of a word—its literal meaning—but also its connotation, or what we can use the word to imply. McPhee describes these subtleties as “hues,” similar to the differences we assign to colors. For example, “gleam” appears in a list of synonyms for “flash.” If we want to describe someone who is angry, we might say, “her eyes flashed,” but we’re unlikely to say “her eyes gleamed,” instead reserving that word for a happier person.  

The trick is making sure you have a good dictionary. DePaul’s library provides access to several comprehensive dictionaries, including the gold standard, the Oxford English Dictionary (which, if you’re truly curious, will provide all of the above plus etymology—how the word developed or was first used).

Finally, McPhee discusses the last step in the writing process: the line-by-line, word-by-word edit. Authors like McPhee have expert copy editors for this task. For the rest of us, there are a number of reference books, such as Garner’s Modern American Usage, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and the Saint Martin’s Handbook, to help us decide whether our sentences are parallel and our verbs agree, whether we need “constitute” or “comprise,” or whether they’re “Dickens’s novels” or Dickens’ novels.” 

And, at last, when the nerve-wracking first draft has been transformed into the carefully, thoughtfully revised final product, we have the pleasure of starting all over. And once again, friends, family, and colleagues ask, “So what are you working on?”

See What Shakespeare Has to Say About Your Writing

And not only Shakespeare: you could have Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Dickinson weigh in as well. This nifty little tool from Google Docs gives writers the chance to experience, for better or worse, what it would be like to collaborate with the greats. As you type, Google uses its search algorithms to insert edits based on words, phrases, and passages regularly associated with these authors, thus allowing each to leave his or her stamp on your work. Here's one author's test run, in which Poe and Dickens express some strong opinions about an apple seed.