One Word

In AP Literature, we've been looking at what the differences between a word, a sentence, and a paragraph are. There's a book, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, that introduces a technique of reading that we've never looked into before. It's close reading. The difference between that and (usually) regular reading is reading verses soaking each word in.

With each word, there is the implicit and explicit definition. The explicit looks like this:

quench

\ kwench \  , verb;

1.

To slake, satisfy, or allay (thirst, desires, passion, etc.).

However, the implicit is something like what it connotates, or what it leans towards when I say it. Usually the connotation is either positive or negative, but words like sinister or toxic have a more dark connotation compared to just negative. There is even neutral or cold, like stigma or beaker. I mention these because I had to include those in my book.

I was almost going into a really in-depth concept, but skipping along, the moral of this story is that one word can change the entire meaning for the novel. We can look at a sentence and get the general meaning just by skimming and assuming because of subject and verb that this is what they're thinking. But what they use to describe those two things (or even the verbs themselves) can be the polar opposite of what you had been thinking. Like this from the Abandoned Farmhouse by Ted Kooser: 

a tall man too, says the length of the bed 

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, 

says the Bible with a broken back

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

Now, the rest of the poem deals with the sudden disappearance of a small family from a farmhouse, and the reader is left to put all of the pieces together to why they left. But this part particularly intrigued me. 

Initially, you would see a couple of cliches (good, God-fearing man) and automatically because of our experience in life, we've gathered that God-fearing doesn't actually mean fearing, but it is a way of saying that one is really religious. However, when we see broken, we may also think that it is just used overly. But what good, God-fearing man would describe the bible's binding as broken? That connotates pain, fervent searching, maybe even throwing it across the room. Then we realize that God-fearing may actually mean God-fearing. Then we see that this man may not be good, it may be sarcasm. He could be the nastiest man alive. 

All from the word broken. 

The power of words is one of the strongest forces in the world, pertaining to the mind. You put one next to the other, and they both create different colors together. Then string thousands of them together, let them dangle, let them hog chunks of space, let the introverts remain by themselves. Each word was placed there for a reason. Soak it in.