Improve your vocabulary

[rosiepink]

I have a younger sister in a public high school. About a year ago, I helped to improve her vocabulary. I mostly used Paul Theroux's travel books because I like him. His writing style is concise and easy to read, but at the same time it has a range of vocabulary and emotions. The travel books were great because you can read one small chapter and studied it by itself. When you do this, you not only learn vocabulary but also how to write well. (The other writers I used were Jonathan Raban, Edna O'Brien, and Nathaniel Hawthorne). My sister likes to read, but she mainly reads Harry Potter and other sci-fi books. She was convinced that she was smart and knew all there was to know about the world. After all, her friends in high school didn't read books so that made her the 'smart one', right? So it was a great shock for her to take a sample PSAT test and score in the low 50's in every section. I looked at some of her essays that she wrote in school and almost didn't know what to tell her. Every sentence had a major grammatical error. I don't know why her teachers let her into an advanced English class when she didn't know how to write a sentence. I finally told her that her chances of getting a 4-year college degree were not good because professors expect students to be able to write essays in class. You can't write quickly if you have limited vocabulary, bad spelling skills, and no conception of sentence construction. So after a long year of intense self-study, my sister took the PSAT and scored a 65 and 64 in the reading and writing sections. She is now able to write a paragraph with few to no errors. By reading some of Theroux's writings, she also discovered that she did not know as much about the world as she thought and she became interested in LEARNING MORE. In the hope of helping other people, I will post a list of vocabulary from Theroux's books. Here are the ones from Riding the Iron Rooster.

Chapter 8--------------
lamentable
rivet
placard
catafalque
fob
cathartic
farcical
misapprehension
appalling
conceit
pastoral
crenellation
despondency
hectoring
rapacious
supine

Shaoshan
---------
stodge
palate
ardor
ditty
temperate
magnanimous
insurrection
fervor
limpid
epitaph
glade
atrium
idyllic
hallowed
hagiography
languid
heffalump
enigma
sinologist
chauvinistic

Chapter 14 Harbin
-----------------
farce
furrow
swarthy
incredulous
philistine
paternal
rigmarole
bungalow
frugal
gable
colonade
decadent
kitsch
libidinous
exploitation
blithely
notoriety

Chapter 15 Langxiang
--------------------
austerity
harridan
trifle
enigmatic
pneumatic
spinnaker
primeval
patronize
phlegmatic
dour
sanguine
inscrutable
sluice
chute
congeal
revel
floe