Have you ever completed the Word Power feature in Reader’s Digest? I’m not much interested in such games – I don’t even do crosswords! – but I am committed to increasing my own vocabulary. Why? Because if I know more words, I’ll be able to read more fluently. But even more important, I’ll be able to write better. Knowing lots of words allows me – and you — to be more precise in writing. In my word-of-the-week feature I share a word with you that I’ve discovered in my own reading.
Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: feeble… A recent, thoroughly engaging piece in the New Yorker, “Go Ask Alice,” explores the story of Alice in Wonderland — “as familiar […]
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: eureka. I was reading with interest a New Yorker story about the history of mass-market publishing, written by Louis Menard, when I came
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: thrawn. I read Kate Atkinson’s 1995 debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum more than a decade ago and it has remained one of
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: panacea. I can’t recall when I learned the word panacea, but I’ve loved it ever since. For more than 40 years, I’ve known it means a
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: chortle. I was reading an amusing Kathryn Schulz piece in the New Yorker about writer Nell Zink this week. (The piece was headlined “Outside In” and appeared in
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: adducing. When I don’t know a word I enjoy guessing at its meaning. My husband is better at this than I am because
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: villanelle I’ve suddenly become an enormous fan of the journalist, blogger and science writer Clive Thompson. A reader sent me a copy
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: soughing. I hadn’t heard of writer Richard Wagamese until a couple of years ago when a friend recommended his book Ragged Company. I
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: predella. I was recently in New York City where I satisfied a 25-year ambition: I finally managed to travel to Cloisters, a satellite
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: henid. I love learning new words! Some writers — such as Alice Gregory — make the task especially easy by including definitions of