Do you read with a dictionary?
Last week we talked about our battle against the dreaded "summer slide!"
The truth is though, the evil villain Slideon (Traveling Stories’ summer slide monster) is always lurking near by. Mental slide is a serious thing. According to McGraw-Hill, in 1950 the average 14 year-old had a vocabulary of 25,000 words. By the time 1999 rolled around, this had made a dramatic drop to only 10,000 words. Numbers like this are frightening because a person's vocabulary directly reflects their overall general knowledge.
There is an extremely simple way to battle these factors though. The answer is to read! Read as much as you can. But not only that, read with a dictionary at the ready.
Although it varies, the average person uses 5,000 words in their speech and about 10,000 in their writing. A college-educated individual could even have as many as 80,000 words in their repertoire.
Reading challenges our minds. Alone, reading the works of Shakespeare would expose you to roughly 33,000 different words, many of which may be new to you.
But it's not just simply reading a new word, it's understanding the new word that you have come across.
This is where the dictionary comes in to play. Keep one close by when you read. In this day in age we can all have a dictionary at our fingertips within minutes. Don't know a word? Type it in to Google. The first search hit is usually the dictionary.com definition. Even better, Merriam-Webster has a dictionary app! (Side note: I have this app on my phone and I use the "word a day" feature to give my co-workers a new word every week. I like to broaden their vocabulary when I can because they always tell me mine is too large.)
Every time you come across a new word in a book, instead of just skipping over it, look it up! Sure you can use deductive reasoning and context clue to determine a rough idea of what the word means, but by finding it in the dictionary you will be allowing yourself to learn something new!
Something so simple can keep your mind sharp, constantly adding new bits of information.
So, toss a dictionary straight at that darn Slideon! Summer slide and mental slide be gone!