Vocabulary Simplified: Strategies for Building Your College Vocabulary Book

I. THE WHYS AND HOWS OF IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY.

A. Your Vocabulary: What Your Professors and Employers Know about You.

B. Vocabulary and College Success.

C. Vocabulary and Workplace Success.

D. Dictionaries: Worthwhile Investments.

E. How to Learn New Words.

F. Use It or Lose It! A System for Using the Words You Learn.

G. You are What You Eat: A Daily Menu of New Words.

Applying and Integrating What You Have Learned.

II. USING CONTEXT TO FIGURE OUT WORDS.

A. Making Educated Guesses About Word Meaning.

B. Types of Context Clues.

C. What to Do When Context Doesn’t Work.

D. After Context, Then What?.

Applying and Integrating What You Have Learned.

III. USING WORD PARTS TO EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY.

A. Word Parts: The Bargain Table for Vocabulary Building.

B. Word Parts and Academic Disciplines.

C. Prefixes: Beginnings the Change Word Meanings.

D. Roots: The Building Blocks of Language.

E. Suffixes: Endings That Change a Word’s Part of Speech.

Applying and Integrating What You Have Learned.

IV. VOCABULARY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

A. Words of Loan: Foreign Words and Phrases.

B. Words Have Feelings, Too: connotative Meanings.

C. Not Saying What You Mean: Euphemisms.

D. Untangling a Tangle of Words: Doublespeak.

E. Where Do New Words Come From.

F. Let Your Creativity Show: Use Figurative Language.

G. Stretching Your Thinking With Words: Analogies.

H. Is It Lie or Lay? Commonly Confused Words.

V. A WEEKLY MENU OF NEW WORDS.

A. Campus Terminology.

B. Computers/Information Systems.

C. Law.

D. Health/Medicine.

E. Education.

F. Business.

G. Biology.

H. Psychology/Sociology.

I. Politics/Government.

J. Literature.

K. Arts.

Appendix: Prefixes, Roots and Suffixes.