Writer's Choice Grade 11Unit 25:
VocabularyOverviewA writer with a small vocabulary is like an artist with only two tubes of paint, a golfer with only one club, or a chef with only three ingredients in his or her pantry. The more words you know, the better you can express yourself. For example, you can claim to have been lambasted rather than merely insulted and you can hypothesize rather than simply guess why you weren't picked for the team.
English is constantly adding new words from other languages and popular slang. You can often decipher an unfamiliar word's meaning from specific or general context clues (this explains why you often “know” a word when you read it but can't supply its meaning when you see it out of context on a vocabulary quiz).
You can figure out the meanings of unknown words by analyzing their parts; study lists of word roots (main word parts), prefixes (word parts attached to the beginning of a word), and suffixes (word parts attached to the ending of a word). You might notice that some of these word parts mean the same thing in a foreign language you have studied. Studying roots, prefixes, and suffixes will help prepare you for the vocabulary portion of college entrance exams.
As you have read, you can add new words to your vocabulary in many ways, but the best way is to read a wide variety of material, both fiction and nonfiction. |  |
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