I grew up in the Methodist Church singing Phillip Bliss’s hymn “Wonderful Words of Life,” lyrics that came to me as I’ve been contemplating the influence of communication technology on literacy. “Where have all the big words gone?” if you will pardon one more song reference of another bygone era. (Apologies to Peter, Paul, and Mary.)

I’ve recently learned some startling facts: (1) Most modern novels are written on a 4th grade level. (2) In order to engage modern readers, novels must be written from a “deep POV” (point of view) to create a virtual experience. (3) Writers who buck publishers’ rules, along with philosophical biases, don’t get published since they know what sells (always the critical factor). Some of these rules are: don’t use adjectives ending in ly or ing, italics, (parentheses), or exclamation points!

As a novice to the writing profession, I find these factors to be discouraging since I love big words, love classical literature, and write stories that don’t follow contemporary rules. But primarily I love words. Did you know there are over 170,000 words in our English language (not to mention 57,000 considered obsolete), and the average modern adult uses less than a thousand of them? Think of what we are missing!

Perhaps instead of texting emojis to express ourselves, we should be exercising our vocabulary to communicate our thoughts and feelings. For example, I might answer the question, “How was your day?” with something more descriptive than “fine” — ”