The 101 Guide To Being A Wordsmith!
This approach towards memorising and retrieving words has been made after studying the science of learning words and how they are stored in our minds. As a result, it is based on existing linguistic models and is basically my compilation of those few which would be helpful in guiding us to learn words.
Essential Prerequisites!
- Find yourself a place where you can work peacefully without much disturbance.
- Sit with a notebook (start maintaining one especially for your words) and a pencil.
- Be prepared to focus. Learning words the deep way can be somewhat different from just memorizing their definitions.
- Don’t set a huge agenda. Small steps lead to big progress!
It is best to take on 3-5 words per day, rather than committing yourself to a 20 or so. However, if you are facing a time-crunch, that would be a completely different story!
The Method
This method looks to ingrain the word deeply in the mind. It is a 10-step process which would require you to think more about the word, than doing something with it.
The writing part only kicks in during the 8th step. Apart from that, all other steps are mind work.
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Retrieval
Naturally, when a word is ingrained deep into your mental lexicon, it comes out whenever you face a situation which fits its context.
However, if you come across a situation but happen to forget the word (or the mot juste) momentarily, you can always try to retrieve it through your mnemonic.
Incase that fails too, there is a last resort - The Cohort Model.
For this to work, you would at-least have to remember the first letter of the word. Once you get that, you start probing deeper, crossing out all the other possibilities as you do so. It’s basically like following the process of elimination.
For example - Say you forgot the word ‘Candle’, but you remember what it means.
This is how the cohort model would work -
Firstly, cross out all other parts of speech. You would know that a candle is a thing. So you have already sized down your list considerably.
C...... [There are still all the things which start with C]
C.A..... [ Cart? Call?...] Go ahead. Narrow it down!
C.A.N..... Candle! (In the category of Things and in the specific situation, the word has reached its uniqueness point. Then, it is easy to grasp).
For this to happen, you must be able to probe deep into your mental lexicon. It would be a bit hard but if you learn the word properly, there wouldn’t be much to probe into!