This is a warning, really, to not force trying to improve your writing vocabulary.

If one does, they are likely to not end up with the best words.

Take it slow.

In fact, if you force it, you might even look a little stupid.

The best way to improve a writing vocabulary is the best way to improve all writing.

Read. Read everything. Read widely. And then write.

Write more. And then read more. Keep going.

And don’t ever stop.

Read every day and write every day, and you will improve in every part of your writing.

At least that’s what I try to do.

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. (You’ll be doing that as you read, of course . . . . but that comes later.) One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the 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.

-Stephen King, On Writing

If you think about it, the written history of humanity has captured the overwhelming majority of our past.

I mean, how many ways are there to communicate?

You can read something.
Listen to something.
Or, see something.

Photographs and audio recordings have only been around since the early to mid-1800’s.

And the first video recording was not made until the very end of the 1800’s.

But books? Books saved us.

Humans communicating with the written word has been around since 3200 B.C.

Books have been the record the history of humanity.

Thank goodness a few people started writing it all down.

About seven hundred years ago Richard de Bury—an English monk, librarian, book collector, and eventually Bishop of Durham—wrote that “in books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction