Expand your vocabulary - Ray Nadeau

A unique departure from current vocabulary-building texts, this book features word-choices in short excerpts (under 250 words each) from forty different writers and speakers, among them notables like Vicki Kemper, Vernon Jordan, Karen Armstrong, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Albert Shanker, Andrew Hacker, and Juliet Schor. Their topics range widely from 'World Population and Your Life' to 'Leadership for the Future'. The book is a practical and interesting way to study words in meaningful context rather than as isolated entities. Another innovation is that each of the forty 'Days' is accompanied by a commentary, 'Language Uses and Abuses,' on how words are formed and how to check and improve language usages. Topics include Like as a Preposition and Like as a Verb; Get Lost, Hopefully; How Not to Make a Good Impression; Two Handy Latin Phrases; What's in a Name?; and Word-Surfing with the Greek. Then, based on the word-choices studied from a particular context-passage, each 'Day' closes with comprehension checks which include matching meanings, choosing synonyms, and choosing antonyms. And a final noteworthy feature: a sounds-of-speech pronunciation system so easy to understand that it makes the usual pronunciation key unnecessary.