Effective communication

THE ROOT DETECTIVE

Students often realise,typically a few months before their exams,that they need to work on their vocabulary.However,learning new words along with all the quriks of their usage seems a daunting task for students to acccomplish in a period of time as short as four or five months.

Now the best way to really master a language,which suerly involves developing a rich and varid vocabulary in it,is to read the wonderful literature available in that language.However,this is a process that takes years and cannot be compressed into months.

Hence,students use the next best remedy-the Word List-which not only includes achoice selection of the 'most likely to be asked' words in alphabetic order dot also lists them out in more specific groups such as foreign terms,phobias,manias,words with common Greek or Latin roots and prefixes and so on.

Learning a new word in this way --as part of an interconnected group--is perhaps the most effective way to make it our own.Once we get the key to the meaning of any word,that is when the word starts making complete sense to us because we know its original root as well as modern usage,we can unlock a veritable treasure trove of new words belonging to the same word family.

This opens up an entire world of words--with subtle shifts in sense and delicate nuances,depending on their usage in a sentence.