Make your Nouns Specific

How to Enhance Your Writing with Specific Nouns

Identify vague or generic nouns in your writing.
For each noun, list specific types or categories it belongs to (ask yourself “What specific types or categories could this noun belong to?” or “What kind of object is this?”).
Choose the most fitting and descriptive option from your list.
As a last resort, add an adjective to your noun (but don’t add more than one).

While you can follow this process at any time, it’s often more useful to do it as part of the editing process so it doesn’t slow down your writing.

Example

Consider the image above. What’s happening in it?

Most people would likely say there’s a man walking toward a car in a parking lot. While accurate, that description is rather bland. Let’s strengthen our description by making the nouns more specific.

Step 1

Let’s identify the vague nouns in our sentence.

A man walked toward a car parked under a tree in a parking lot.

Step 2

For each noun, let’s look for more specific category or descriptor. Ask yourself, what kind of object is this?

The man is wearing a suit. What kind of men wear suits? Maybe he’s a salesman, a lawyer, a banker, an executive, or a spy.

The car is red, but just saying “red car” is still pretty generic. What kind of car is it? Who’s car is it? Perhaps it’s a scarlet Ferrari, a rusty Toyota, a spotless Lexus, or a maroon sedan. Even minor details like this can reveal important information to the observant reader. The type of car implies something about its owner: a lawyer who drives a rusty Toyota might not be as successful as the one who drives a spotless Lexus.

The car is parked under a tree. The word tree is generic. What kind of tree? It could be an oak or a maple.

The parking lot is also a generic term. Maybe the car is parked in front of a particular store.

Step 3

Using more specific nouns, we can turn our bland sentence into:

The lawyer walked toward his spotless Lexus, shaded by an old oak tree.
The doctor walked toward his scarlet Audi, parked in front of the clinic.
The mall’s landlord walked toward a rusty Toyota parked for days in front of the delicatessen.

Step 4

When necessary, add an adjective to your noun. Note one adjective is almost always better than two. If you have two adjectives in mind, pick the stronger of the two.

Final Tips

Obviously, the specific nouns and details will depend on the context of your story. Depending on the specifics, you may need to research to identify specific nouns that make sense for your scene.

Specificity is an important tool to strengthen our writing. Specificity also applies to verbs.