Antithesis of Brevity

By Kripal Singh

Improving your vocabulary involves two steps comprehension and retention.

Vocabulary is the complete spectrum of language — the entire gamut of words with their synonyms, antonyms, etc. Our knowledge of the language, widens in proportion with the increase in the vocabulary.

Improving your vocabulary involves two steps — comprehension and retention. The first step involves your knowledge about the meaning of a word, and the second step is when you retain it in your mind for using it at a later stage, whenever required.

One might wonder at the necessity of an extensive vocabulary when it is well-known that ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’. A few dos’ and don’ts’ in vocabulary learning


1. Never try to memorise lists of new words. Words senselessly memorised, will not stay in your head. Only if they are learnt in content and made use of, in speech and writing, they will remain in your mind.

2. When you come across a new word, first make an educated guess. Then crosscheck your guess in a dictionary — in terms of spelling as well as meaning.

3. Practise the new word. Make up sentences using the new word in context. While constructing the sentence, have a mental picture of the sentence so that the word gets embedded in your mind.

4. Reading, reading and more reading will help you to expand your repertoire of words. Reading should progress from simple to complex. Tests have proved that if there are many unfamiliar words in a passage, the reader will lose track of the content. If the unfamiliar words are very few; the reader can grasp the meaning in context. So read constantly, but appropriately.You need not take an abstract work or an intellectual article for this exercise.
Choose a book or a novel or a magazine or a newspaper that interests you, and read.

5. Next comes listening. Listen to good conversation, speech, etc, among people, on radio or on television. Careful listening will widen your vocabulary.

6. It is not enough if you just know the words. You must know when and where to use them. Words when used inappropriately, will create an incongruous effect.

7. Learn the connotation and the grammatical context of the word. A word used in one place cannot be used in the same format elsewhere.

If these basic steps are followed, we can widen our vocabulary and become versatile in the usage of a variety of words.