You are a hypnotist. Yes, you are. If you are a writer, you

are a hypnotist. Hypnosis, in my dictionary, is "an artificially induced sleeplike condition in which an individual is extremely responsive to suggestion."

I can't think of anyone more responsive to suggestion than the enthralled reader. A killer is in the closet, you say, and the reader's heart starts racing. You hint that there is treasure on the island; the reader envisions the pieces of eight and prepares for adventure. There is no sign of a gun, not a whisper of danger, no battened and sea-crusted chest set before him. You convince the reader with no more than a collection of squiggly black lines on white paper. And those lines can be infinitely more effective than the shiniest gold watch swinging before the glazed eyes of the hypnotist's subject.

The lines, of course, form units called words, which possess in varying degrees the power to hypnotize your readers, to convince them of your suggestions. Some words are absolutely mesmerizing. Some merely induce a mild trance. And some are so poorly chosen that they wenfronckmonkin jar the reader out of his trance.

Consider what just occurred in your brain when you came upon the word wenfronckmonkin. You were going along with my suggestions. You believed that you could hear me speaking to you. You had "forgotten" that you were reading. But my invented word wenfronckmonkin, an extreme example of choosing the wrong word, had no power to keep you hypnotized. For an instant, you "woke up" and realized that you were reading.

Certainly you don't fill your prose with nonsense words that make bizarre noises in the reader's head. But you might be using far too many of the words that have little of the power required to hold a reader's attention. One word usually won't shatter the spell you have cast over the reader, unless it is something absolutely inappropriate like wenfronckmonkin, or a word that is blatantly misspelled or contains a typographical error. But if you consistently use words with little power, your reader will never descend very deeply into the trance. Throughout the reading process, he will remain aware that he is reading, and you will be in constant danger of losing him to the TV, that chore that's been nagging him, or the article that begins on the next page of the magazine. (Keep in mind that long before that, your reader will be an editor and you could lose him to the next manuscript on his desk.)

So, after you have finished a draft of a story or article, strengthen it: rearrange sentences, shorten paragraphs, add dialogue, introduce another character, etc. But after you've done that, read through the manuscript again and cross out all the words that have little power to entrance a reader, and replace them with words that have the power. I'm going to give you some guidelines that will help you find words with power. But first, three points to remember.

1. This article is about words, not sentences, so I am not offering here all the possible rules about finding words with power. These are guidelines to help you cross out old words and put in new ones without rearranging sentences. There are many ways of getting more power from a word by rewriting sentences and paragraphs, but that's another article.
2. These rules frequently overlap. Many words have two or more of the qualities generally associated with words of power. "Specific" words are usually more "dense." "Short" words are usually more "familiar" and so forth. Also, there will be apparent contradictions. A word that has less power by one rule might have more power by another.

3. While we can generalize about which words have power and which don't, the ultimate test of a word's power to hypnotize comes in the context of what you are writing and its relation to the words around it. Use these guidelines when you reread your manuscript, but test each change before you make it. Read the sentence out loud as it stands, then read it with the word changes you are considering. In time, you will develop a true ear for words with power and eventually you will find that the words of greater power come easily to you in the first draft.