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Better Vocabulary in 30 Minutes a day | |
Publisher: Career Press
Authors: Edie Schwager
US$9.99
ISBN 1-56414-247-7
This book is one of a series, which also offers Better Sentence Writing, Better Grammar and Better Spelling, each in thirty minutes a day. The vocabulary book has been written Edie Schwager, who is a well-known English language expert and writer. The book promises to improve your vocabulary skills, but a closer look at the book shows that it has no organized study programme at all. Instead it is basically a dictionary of interesting, confusing or obscure words. You can spend just five minutes a day with this book if that is all you have time for.
This is not a large book, having 188 pages in all. All these pages are given over to text- there are no illustrations at all. The book starts with a preface which tells you a lot about English, its origins, and why the language is worth studying, but it does not tell you much about the rest of the book or how to use it. The other two major sections are called 'Words are Tools' and 'Word Roots', and at the end there are eight pages of 'Word Aerobics', which are simply vocabulary exwercises. 'Words are Tools' does not tell you how to use these tools, but is simply a list of words. Each word has a definition, a note of where the word came from (i.e. Latin, German, Indian etc)and an example of the word in use. Some explain the difference of words such as 'nauseous' and 'nauseated'. (Something nauseous makes you feel nauseated, so don't make the common mistake of telling people that you feel nauseous when you are ill.) Others are words that even experienced English users might only need once or twice in a lifetime, such as 'stannous'; which means 'having tin in it' (e.g. a stannous metal). The 'Word Roots' are words formed from common roots, so that, for example, words with 'com' or 'col' or 'con' tend to mean 'together' (e.g. company, collection, congregation).
Who is this book for? The target is anyone who wants to make their writing seem more erudite (educated) by the use of aposite (exactly right) vocabulary. Schoolboys looking for higher marks for their essays might use this, or businessmen wanting to impress a client. EFL students will find the book fun, but will have to take care not to learn and use words that even most native speakers do not know.
Verdict: It's a dictionary of difficult or obscure words, not a vocabulary learning course.
Assessment 5/10