We the word-rich will have habits of reading and writing and speaking and listening. Language, culture and upbringingĪs the word-rich, we’ll be able to read a book or article on a subject that’s familiar to us and scan it quickly, expertly, comparing what we’re reading now with our prior knowledge, simultaneously making decisions about what’s familiar, what’s novel, what’s true, what’s false. When we write we’ll avoid repetition of the same word because we learned that the repetition of the same word leads to clunky writing that is clunky because of the repetition of the same word.
Word vs word rich how to#
If there’s a word we’re uncertain about how to spell, such as “accommodation” or “fulfil”, we’ll have a memory device, a mnemonic, to help us, or we’ll look it up, or we’ll simply substitute a different word with a similar meaning. We are the word-rich, and even the least confident of us will have ways of concealing our occasional linguistic anxieties. We routinely use vocabulary in both our speech and writing to express ourselves with precision and clarity. It’s about those who - apparently effortlessly - can see inky words on a page or screen and decode them to make meaning, to see pictures, to understand ideas, and to enjoy stories. As a shorthand, let’s call them the word-rich and the word-poor.įirst: the word-rich.
This is an article about language, about two broad groups of people who use it.