Importance of Vocabulary in effective Communication
Good communication skills rest on three pillars.
1. Great thought.
2. Powerful and relevant reasoning.
3. Choice of right set of words, keeping in mind the demography of the audience and relevance of the subject matter.
In simple words, powerful and effective communication is great thought reasoned well in the right set of words, with a harmonious blend of tone, pitch and body language, among the right audience at the right place and at an appropriate time.
It goes without saying that a good command over vocabulary is necessary for good communication skills.
How to improve vocabulary?
The key to enhance memory and retention is the ignition of feelings and emotions. This is the reason that we forget the words that we learn from a dictionary. A good dictionary is a good source of right meaning of words, but fails to ignite feelings in us. We can draw an analogy. Irrespective of the fact that we meet a lot of people everyday we fail to remember most of them, except those who have carved a niche in our heart on account of some powerful emotional bonding. The same to a certain extent is true for words also. If while memorising words, we can ignite some feelings related to the words, we will find that we invariably remember such words. Not only do we remember those words, but also use them naturally in our expression of thoughts.
Simple tricks to retain words
1. Jugaad-a unique Indian method of thinking out of the box. Under this trick, we use parts of spelling, pronunciation or anything that is present in the word and can be related to its meaning in some way. One good thing with this trick is that it grows with the improvement of vocabulary. We have used this in our video lectures for many words.
2. Roots. A lot of English words have been derived from Greek and Latin. Generally, when a Greek or Latin word comes into English it ends up being a part of many English words and retains its Greek or Latin meaning. If we can collect words around these roots, we can remember a lot of words. Some very common roots are “gamy”, “-cide”, “loq”, “-gress”, etc. Refer to our lectures for more.
3. Word Origin stories. Behind a lot of English words (derived from other languages, especially Greek and Latin), there is a story. If we know the story it can tickle some feeling, thereby creating a powerful anchor for the word. A lot of these stories have been used in our lectures.
4. Synonyms and Antonyms. Anybody who would have ever tried to mug up words from dictionary would have found that the larger the number of words learned individually, the poorer the retention. It is better to learn words in groups and the easiest groups that we can create are synonyms and antonyms. But be cautious synonym does not necessarily mean exactly same meaning. For instance, “brave” and “audacious” are synonyms but “brave” has a positive connotation whereas “audacious” has a negative. We can use a good thesaurus to collect synonyms and antonyms, but is advisable to also use a dictionary to find the difference in the shade of the meaning of different synonyms and antonyms.
5. Reading and Writing. Irrespective of the fact that how many words we may have learned, unless we consciously use them in our own expression either of reading or writing, we can never develop effective communication skills. So, it is advisable that we should try writing short articles over subjects of our understanding on a regular basis.
6. Patience. We must confess that we cannot build Rome in a day. Hence, we must have patience with a right blend of perseverance to withstand the odds.
7. Guidance. If we can find the right guidance and support in all the steps stated above, we can smoothen our endeavour.
You can also understand this better by watching this video on our YouTube channel:
Vocabulary Mnemonics-Mann Ka Tonic
All the best. Happy learning.
We will soon follow up this article with articles on how to develop reasoning skills and how to work on our body language- a necessary epilogue to effective communication.