on Writing Forward:

Poetry writing exercises are an excellent way to develop writing skills, especially skills that are essential to writing compelling poetry. Writing exercises can provide us with new perspectives, techniques, and ideas that strengthen and improve poems we’ve written and poems we have yet to write.

Words are the most basic building blocks for writers, and words have meanings. Often, words have multiple meanings or layers of meaning.

Connotation refers to the often subtle nuances that exist within a word’s definition. Consider the words childish and childlike. These words are synonyms — they have the same basic meaning. But childish has a negative connotation and is often used as an insulting way to describe immature behavior, whereas childlike is often used to describe behavior that is innocent or full of awe and wonder. Both words mean someone or something is like a child, but childlike implies that’s a good thing while childish indicates it’s a bad thing.

Today we’ll use connotation to unearth the potential of a poem. Using a thesaurus, we’ll find synonyms for key words in the poem, and then examine how the connotations of the synonyms change the poem’s meaning.