Difficult words

                         

How do you come to use the ‘difficult’ words that you come across in your readings? How do we learn what words mean? Our understanding of them, of course, grows with exposure. We see a word in context and come to understand its general meaning. For some words that you are unfamiliar with, it will be enough to look up the word in a dictionary to find out its meaning. Other words are more tricky to grasp. You might look up the word but not understand the definition. You might see authors discuss the word and still not understand what it means. This is often the case for abstract theoretical concepts.

If your course involves lots of these 'difficult words' then it might be useful to try the following:

• Stick a piece of paper on the wall or open a document on your computer that is simply titled with this word. Let's imagine the word is ‘neoliberalism’. You keep coming across it on your course but you don’t feel you understand its meaning.
• Note down any definitions you have found for the word on the document.
• When a lecturer uses the word you could make a note of it, in context, or paste that section of the lecture slide into this document. Here, you are building up a picture of what the word means.
• You might also come across the word when reading the news or listening to the radio. In the case of the word ‘neoliberalism’, you might find a journalist describing something as 'neoliberal' - again, make a quick note of the context.
• Your document will grow and, perhaps, when taken together, these notes start to help you get a sense of how the word's meanings.

You might want to begin to build your own glossary of subject specific words that are used in your course. Remember to make a note of the page number of the article or book if you are noting down definitions of words. You’ll then be able to cite them easily.