I had a discussion in an upper-level course yesterday related to all of
this, and I've got a couple of questions. I gave my "endeavour or try"
example, and told students that if I saw that, I would recommend getting rid
of "endeavour or" rather than "or try", and then I went on to say that if
they find themselves writing "utilize", they should stop and use "use"
instead. Fireworks erupted (which is a very good thing, of course...).
Students had two reasons for continuing to say "utilize". One student
said that if she were saying "He used X and she used Y and they used Z", it
would sound "less redundant" to say "He used X and she utilized Y and they
utilized Z". I think there's a common misconception there, that one should
endeavour to utilize different words each time one says something, for
variety. In my opinion, unless one means something different each time, one
should use the same word each time. Right?
Other students argued for using "utilize" because they said it made them
sound more smart. I think that's an extremely common misconception among
college students. In my opinion, writing "utilize" makes one sound less
smart, not more smart, and in general using fancy words in the place of
perfectly good day-to-day words is a mistake*. Right? It seems to me that
when a student tries to sound smart by using big words, she shows that she
doesn't understand that one sounds smart by making good arguments in well
written papers. The "large words" method strikes me as a lazy "out".
* Or "in general, using fancy vocabulary rather than utilizing perfectly
adequate colloquial words is erroneous. Would you not agree?".
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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