On the recommendation of two writers whose opinions I highly value, I am reading Stephen King’s marvelous On Writing—a kind of memoir/how-to hybrid about the writer’s craft. I remain largely unfamiliar with and uninterested in King’s body of fiction, but On Writing is shaping up to be a practical, inspiring, and surprisingly poignant read. It has lit the fires of writing for me, and has me reevaluating my habits, strengths, and vices.

One of these vices—about which I was previously half-ashamed, half-ignorant—is what King refers to as “dressing up vocabulary.” He writes:

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up your vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip”…Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.

I take (foolish) pride in my vocabulary, and I never (okay, rarely) use a word that I didn’t already know the definition of. But I confess that I suffer from chronic thesaurusitis—an incessant compulsion to look up smarter synonyms for words that I want to use.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed (as King assumes) of my shorter, “pedestrian” words. I think I’ve simply bought the same lie that too many high school English students buy, that I need to use big, fancy words to write a good, smart paper. King’s curt dismissal of this behavior has strengthened the (heretofore) weak conviction I’ve held that this over-reliance on the thesaurus is a crutch. That’s not to say that the resource shouldn’t be wisely used to locate a word that my slippery memory has temporarily misplaced, by means of a related word. The sin, I believe, is accessorizing my writing with too many of these cute, shiny trinkets that I overspend on at the synonym store.

King has me convinced that the best writing is clear writing, and that my best tools—meaning here vocabulary—are the ones already in the “top drawer” of my toolbox. I should reject the lie that the amount of syllables is proportionate to the amount of cleverness. I should favor clarity over gloss, simplicity over complexity. All I need to do to see the wisdom in this principle is read someone else’s prose overburdened with what are clearly nonindigenous fancy words. It reads clumsy and unclear, and it taints or even dams up the writer’s message. It’s more than enough to make me go home and take the tuxedo off my poor pug.