Preface

Build Your Vocabulary Skills! A Quick and Easy Method - John LaCarna 2017


Preface

This book will enable you to increase your English vocabulary as quickly and easily as possible. The immediate focus is on expanding your recognition vocabulary -- the words you are able to understand. You will learn and retain forever the meanings of words you are most likely to encounter in your reading, and on various psychological, academic, and professional tests. The method presented here is starkly goal-oriented -- you might say ruthlessly so. The aim is that after applying yourself to this book, you will be able to supply a synonymous definition for up to 1413 words you did not know before. We are not concerned with learning derivations or word roots. These matters may be interesting and important but they are irrelevant to the business at hand.

Our purpose right now is to get a higher score on that SAT or GRE next week, or to gain a deeper understanding of those novels and non-fiction books you read throughout this year and every year from now on. The words you will learn are derived from lists of study words for academic tests and are judged to have the widest general use.

Another phase of vocabulary development involves the active vocabulary -- words you use in your own speech and writing. We don't provide a quick method to improve that -- we don't know of any -- but we can point you to a couple of easy ways.

You will find that as you use this book and recognition vocabulary grows, words that you previously skimmed over in your reading will stand out. When you encounter them, you will automatically take note of the new words you have learned. In this way, over time, you will get a feel for proper usage, for the nuances of denotative and connotative meaning. Then these words will naturally pass into your active vocabulary as they did when you were a child originally acquiring language. This process might be accelerated by using one of the books available at book stores and in libraries, designed to enable their readers to use the words they present.

We strongly recommend against using words before you assimilate their precise meanings. If this is done in an attempt to impress others, it may well have the opposite effect, for there's no more pathetic sign of a poorly educated person than the inappropriate use of a five-buck word. Make sure that you really know words before you use them.