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: About 1.5 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 words: trochee and spondee. When I was in university, I was invited to join the honours program in English and Political Science. The trouble […]
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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: misprision. I can’t escape the notion that, every once in awhile, some authors use words to show off. I level this critique
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Reading time: About 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: plectrumed. My family is intensely interested in music. My grandmother was a conductor, my aunt a concert violinist. My husband sings in a
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Reading time: About 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: concupiscent. I don’t usually read mystery stories; I’m much more interested in other genres. But someone recommended The Silent Wife to me and I
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Reading time: About 2.5 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: scurf. I read the book Tinkers by Paul Harding in 2010, the same year it won the Pulitzer Prize. Although I didn’t find
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: vitrine. It’s not often I stumble across a noun I find difficult to define (unless, of course, it’s a scientific name for
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: fungible. I’d heard the adjective fungible before but I’d never retained its meaning, perhaps because I’d never had cause to use it
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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: Brobdingnagian. I don’t typically welcome distractions when I’m writing, but I appreciated writer Marie Myng-Ok Lee’s spirited defence of the Internet in
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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: ambivert. I recently hosted a birthday dinner for my brother-in-law, Doug. Over the meal we started talking about extroversion and introversion. Doug
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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: agora. When I read Kathryn Schulz’s rousing article about Twitter, I blogged on it. Then I pondered the meaning of a word she’d
