If you have been out of school for a while or are in school and want to excel with your vocabulary, there are some tips that can keep you from saying stupid stuff and that will keep you on track instead. The most important thing that experts recommend is to read as much as possible.
This could include fiction, non-fiction, the newspaper, or more. Anything that captures your interest is fair game, just as long as you read a lot of it, because seeing other people’s vocabularies on paper will help build up your own. The benefit of learning new words from reading is also that you get to see the words in context, helping you decipher their meaning easily in most cases.
Practice is quite important when you are trying to avoid saying stupid stuff and build up a new vocabulary. If you learn a new word, throw it into your daily speech as many times as possible at first to really cement it in your memory. Be sure you know the correct definition and context to use it in, to avoid mistakes from the beginning, or you could sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.
While you don’t need to walk around town with a dictionary in your hand at all times, it can be helpful to have a pocket dictionary to refer to when you are at work or at school. This means that if you hear a word you don’t know that you can simply look it up right there. Those who try to avoid stupid stuff in their normal speech tend to have a habit of looking up new words all the time, and then figuring out how to work them into their normal speech patterns. It’s also helpful to then make a flash card of the word if you really want it to sink in.
If you are preparing for the SAT or other vocabulary tests, then you will want to consult the lists that have been published of common words that you might see. Avoid all of the other stupid stuff that might distract you during this preparation time, and try to focus on the task at hand.
While there is no way to predict precisely which words may appear at test time, experts have indeed been able to narrow down the most frequently used vocabulary words based on their Latin roots, which is a good way to understand language.
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