Important Words

Sean, you mentioned the word, homiletics, in one of your, posts. Then you said it was used quite often in your book. After that, you told what you think it means, and I must say I think you have defined it well.

Mortimer J. Adler wrote a book on reading that was geared toward college students. One of the things he said was important when you are reading any kind of book is to discover the important words. I will build some on his ideas in this post

What are the important words in what you are studying? Well, they probably show up in the titles of the book, or titles of chapters, or titles of subheadings. Another clue is to find words that are especially emphasized by the author. Then, another category of important words can be different for each one of us. Those are the words that are unfamiliar to us.

When dealing with unfamiliar words, maybe like "homiletics," I would suggest you become a word detective. When you come across an unfamiliar word, stop long enough to write down the word. Then replace the word in your imagination with a blank line, like a "fill in the blank" question on a test. Then make your best guess as to what that word means as it is used in the sentence. Write that guess beside your important word, and keep reading. When you come to the word again, stop and see if your earlier guess still fits. If it does, keep reading. If it does not, either refine your earlier guess based on the context of the new sentence (The context is the words or sentences immediately surrounding the word in question) or put down a completely new guess that seems to fit both situations. When you come to the end of the chapter or section you are reading for the day, then get your dictionary. Look at the different dictionary meanings. Many times you will find a dictionary meaning that matches fairly closely with one of your guesses. I find this a lot more fun than stopping to look up each unfamiliar word as I come to it.

Another type of important word is a common word that is used in an unusual or specialized way.

What are some of the important words you have run across in the material you have been reading? Based on the context, what do you think they meant? Did they match up with any dictionary definitions?

When you do this, you can keep reading material that has such a specialized vocabulary that some of its words do not even appear in a regular dictionary.

Anyway, give us some of the important words you have come across for this course, and have fun being a word detective!