In his book Draft No. 4: On the Process of Writing, John McPhee explains his approach to revision. If all goes well, he reads the second draft aloud, “removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading.” If a word doesn’t seem quite right or presents an opportunity, he draws a box around it. Then he goes hunting for a better word, “the search for the mot juste.” He doesn’t grab his thesaurus—which can lead to polysyllabic and fuzzy words—but the dictionary. And not just any dictionary.

He uses Webster’s Collegiate. You can use any dictionary that includes a thesaurian list of synonyms and provides differences between the synonyms, he writes.

Recently, I’ve reached for the Oxford English Dictionary, which happens to be online at the university where I teach. What a trove! A writer’s delight! The OED gives you fistfuls of gifts: the etymology, examples from the past of the word’s usage, and thesaurian lists. In a recent story, I’d written, “The boy might be dangerous.” I looked up “dangerous.” The OED handed me “perilous,” “hazardous,” “risky,” “unsafe,” “hurtful,” “injurious.” “Perilous” sounded good, so I looked it up and got another list of words.

The right word can make a sentence memorable, and, by extension, a story unforgettable. (I looked up “memorable” because I didn’t want to use it twice and got, among other things, “not to be forgotten.”) Though I don’t know if Grace Paley used McPhee’s method of revising draft #2, her writing is over-brimming with le mot juste.

In her short story “Love,” the narrator writes a poem about love and tells her husband about it. The husband then recalls all his many loves, starting at the age fourteen.

Then he told me about two famous poets, one fair and one dark, both now dead, when he was a secret poet working at an acceptable trade in an office without windows.

There’s the lovely parallelism and anaphora of the phrase, “one fair and one dark,” along with the rhythm, the two hard stresses “one fair,” followed by the soft stress, “and,” followed by two hard stresses. But what makes this sentence striking are the words “secret” in “secret poet” and “acceptable” in “acceptable trade.” Why are these words there? What work are they doing?

When I look up “secret” in the OED, I get pages of definitions and synonyms—”kept from knowledge,” “hidden,” “concealed,” “retired,” “affording privacy or seclusion,” “not openly avowed or expressed,” and the external organs of sex, as in “secret parts,” to name just a few.

In terms of plot, this is the first time the narrator’s husband—the couple has been married for over fifteen years—has revealed his history of love affairs, so the word “secret,” so slyly snuck in before “poet,” works not only at the sentence level, drawing attention to his secret life as a poet, but also to his secret love life.

“Acceptable” sends me travelling down the OED’s hallways to find: “pleasing,” “agreeable,” “tolerable or allowable,” “not cause for concern,” “within prescribed parameters.” This, too, fits the story perfectly. The husband presumably found the work tolerable, and, in terms of the plot and story, the husband’s revelation about the poets doesn’t cause the narrator concern. It’s the next confession that will get the husband in trouble, when he tells his wife about Dotty Wasserman, who made her appearance during his marriage to the narrator.

After the candid exchange with her husband, the narrator heads out to buy groceries, and here we have more memorable diction.

Walking along the street, encountering no neighbor, I hummed a little up-and-down tune and continued jostling time with the help of my nice reconnoitering brain.

The “up-and-down tune” beautifully depicts the literal sound of her song. But it’s doing other work, too. The OED has lots to offer for this string of words: “alternately on or to a higher and a lower level or plane”; “with variation of success or fortune”; “varying,” “changeable,” “unstable,” “to and fro,” “topsy-turvy.” (There’s more). It’s the perfect word for the story. The narrator is happy, having written this poem about love, but she is about to encounter someone from the past, a woman who stole her best friend, and so the plot will soon take an emotional downward turn.

Then there’s the word “reconnoitering.” Reconnoiter is usually used as a verb, but Paley polishes it up and makes it an adjective. The OED says: “to make an inspection, or take observation of (an enemy, his or her strength, position).” In a non-military context, it means “to survey or explore a district or area to learn its character, geography, etc.” Again, the word is perfect for what the narrator is about to encounter. In fact, the fall-out with the woman and her best friend had to do with politics.

I look up “jostle”: “to come into collision with,” “to push and shove.” Once again, the word beautifully prepares us for the narrator’s forthcoming encounter.

I’m a little embarrassed to tell you how much time I spend roaming the many tunnels of the Oxford English Dictionary, reading how Shakespeare, Hardy, O’Brien used a word, then looking up the synonyms of words. Then another word. Then again, Gustave Flaubert would walk around for days, searching in his mind for the right word, the le mot juste. To most people, I suppose that’s weird. To me, that seems heroic.

Nina Schuyler’s latest novel, The Translator, was published by Pegasus Books. Her first novel, The Painting, was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.