Name: The well-spoken thesaurus
ISBN: 9781402243219

The well-spoken thesaurus

The Well-Spoken Thesaurus by Tom Heehler, is an American style guide and speaking aid. The Chicago Tribune calls The Well-Spoken Thesaurus "a celebration of the spoken word". The book has also been reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press, and by bloggers at the Fayetteville Observer, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

From Wikipedia

What Hacker News says

mindcrimeAug 2015

Stephen King said something like "To become a better writer, write a lot and read a lot". Here's a couple of articles that discuss that idea more:

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/dreamgates/2011/06/read-...

http://writetodone.com/how-to-use-reading-to-become-a-better...

Beyond that, there are, of course, tons of books for writers, including some specifically for tech writers. A lot of what you'll find on the shelf at, say, Barnes & Noble is about fiction writing, but then again, to some extent you could say that good writing is good writing regardless of whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I don't claim to be a great writer, but I can share a few titles from my own bookshelf on writing:

1. The Elements of Style - Strunk & White

2. On Writing Well - William Zinsser

3. NLP For Writers - Bekki Hill

4. A Certain 'Je Ne Sais Quoi' - Chloe Rhodes

5. A Manual For Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations - Kate L. Turabian

6. The Elements of Technical Writing - Gary Blake & Robert W. Bly

7. The Art of Scientific Writing - Ebel, Bliefert, Russey

8. Writers Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing - Michelle Rubert (ed.)

9. On Writing - Stephen King

10. Zen In The Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury

11. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss

12. Where Do You Get Your Ideas - Fred White

13. The Complete Guide to Article Writing - Naveed Saleh

14. HBR Guide To Better Business Writing - Bryan A. Garner

15. Make A Scene - Jordan E. Rosenfeld

16. Beginnings, Middles, & Ends - Nancy Kress

I'm also a big believer in having a strong vocabulary, even though I don't try to write in a pretentious, sesquipedalian fashion very often. But sometimes it helps to have that "just right" word available. To that end, I recommend:

17. Big Words You Should Know - David Olsen, Michelle Bevilacqua and Justin Cord Hayes

18. The Words You Should Know To Sound Smart - Robert W. Bly

19. The Dictionary of Difficult Words - John Ayto

20. Rogets Thesaurus of Words For Intellectuals - David Olsen, Michelle Bevilacqua, and Justin Cord Hayes

21. The Thinker's Thesaurus - Peter E. Meltzer

22. Fiske Word Power - Fiske, Mallison, Mandell

23. The Well Spoken Thesaurus - Tom Heehler

24. They Have A Word For It - Howard Rheingold

and remember, as Aldous Huxley said "The proper study of mankind is books". And on that note, may I recommend keeping a couple of books of quotations around. A good quote can be quite useful.

25. Mark My Words - Great Quotations and the Stories Behind Them - Nigel Rees

26. The Giant Book of American Quotations - Carruth & Ehrlich

as for websites and blogs and what-not, there is a technical writing subreddit:

http://technicalwriting.reddit.com

and https://writing.reddit.com

and

https://writinghub.reddit.com

You also can't go wrong studying the essays of George Orwell

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/index_en

And I think that's about all I have to contribute, except to reiterate "write a lot, read a lot".

Source: I have no particular distinction as a writer, but I have managed to get a few articles published at InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/author/Phil-Rhodes/ and I've written quite a few blog posts for my full-time employer, like: http://mammothdata.com/big-data-open-source-risk-managment/ and I have written most of the content on the Fogbeam company blog: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com I like to think that if I keep reading and writing, I might actually acquire some skill at it some day.

HTH, YMMV, IANAL, WTFBBQ, ETC.

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mobattahSep 2025

Cultural obituaries are often premature, and the one for literacy is no exception. A nascent contrary impulse is emerging: readers deliberately turning to long-form works as a form of intellectual resistance. I’ve been working through Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy and Tom Heehler’s The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, not just to expand vocabulary but to restore the sinew of productive speech.

That project led me to conscript AI as a private tutor. With custom instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini now surface new words and nudge my prose toward clarity, turning a vague fear of erosion into conviction. A dedicated subset of users will inevitably harness such tools to strengthen their expressive range and communicative precision.

Until recently, my writing rarely left emails and journals. Now, with AI as scaffold and sparring partner, I draft short stories from my own life and recast them in the voices of authors I admire. This feels less like a technology poised to supplant teachers, and more like the substrate for a renaissance in autodidactic education.

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