Today, an old tool with a twist I find useful: the visual thesaurus. My Writers of the Future editor asked for some last updates, and I got stuck on one that should have been simple but was not.
The problem was that beta readers didn’t quite understand the meaning of the phrase I used, and I had to replace it with a completely different word that still captured a complicated feeling. I don’t usually use a thesaurus, but sometimes needs must. My computer’s built-in options don’t handle phrases well, so online I went.
A quick search led me to stumble on one with a visual, as well as a list, interface. (Has this been around forever? Probably, but it was new to me. Perhaps to you too?) Here’s an example:
Care synonyms, care antonyms – FreeThesaurus.com
Each word’s multiple meanings are clustered with related words, antonyms and links. I can always read the options as a list, of course, but I found this presentation surprisingly helpful when it came to brainstorming options.
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J.R. Johnson 
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