Words That Work to Spark Legal Stories -> Onomatopoeia

Remember grade school English?

Remember "onomatopoeia?"

For those of us who snoozed through that class,  Merriam-Webster defines "onomatopoeia" word as "the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (such as hiss or buzz)."

This site offers examples of onomatopoeia used in a variety of literary devices.

My favorite site is a word list for writing and illustrating children's books.  But it has huge application for legal stories.  As does this list from Scribd.

How often do we say, for example, "The car ran the red light"?  What about using words that give the feeling and sense of what happened?  For example, "The car zoomed or sped or hurtled or blasted or careened through the red light."  Instead of "The knife struck the man," what about "The knife slashed through the coat, shredded the sleeve and gouged a gaping wound leaving the blood to plop, plop, plop on the sidewalk."

There are as many uses for living breathing language as we have ideas to blurt.  Have a little fun plucking words that creak and crunch and crackle to take the ho-hum out of your legal stories.