Let's face it. Rote memorization is boring. And difficult. And inefficient. How many times have you sat down to commit something to memory - multiplication tables, musical scales, rules and vocabulary for a foreign language, the periodic table - only to walk away hours later confused, frustrated, and none the wiser for the effort? The first two books in this series, Word Smart and Word Smart II, set out to make the memorization of vocabulary easier by making it more fun. This book, Illustrated Word Smart, takes those efforts one step further. Our goal in this book is to present 250 words that appear most frequently on the difficult portions of the SAT - and have thus earned the imprimatur of 'important words' from the esteemed Educational Testing Service - in a way that would make it impossible for you to forget them. Here's what we did: for each of the 250 words in this book we came up with a mnemonic device. A mnemonic device is anything that aids in memory. In this book, we use rhymes, words, and phrases that are similar to the vocabulary word, and other techniques to help you remember. As an extra helpful tool, where applicable, we have provided icons so you can easily determine which mnemonics are visual and which are auditory. Many are both visual and auditory. Finally, we added a humorous illustration to reinforce the mnemonic device. The illustration and the mnemonic device provide two extra means of learnig each vocabulary word beyond memorizing its definition. The end result, we hope, is a book that is both usedful and entertaining. Students preparing for the SAT should find it particularly helpful, but it should also be useful to adults who hope to expand their vocabulary. |
