For National Reading Month, Time's Katy Steinmetz gives us "9 Great Things to Read in (Roughly) 9 Minutes," a column devoted to reading in contexts other than great books of the "big, blubbery" Moby Dick variety.
Quoting Vocabulary.com executive producer Ben Zimmer, Steinmetz writes:
Luckily for the busy, distracted reader, not all great writing is long. And there are tools that will help new words stick in our brains that also fit into our device-centric lives.
“It’s important, especially for students, to know that vocabulary is something that is living, that is constantly all around them, that literacy doesn’t consist of a particular canon of books,” says Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com, which debuted an addictive word-learning app for iPhones this week. “You can take any text, whether it’s a movie script or the lyrics of a song, and pull out the vocab words.”
Steinmetz goes on to gather nine words from nine short texts that can be read in nine minutes. The result? A collection of great reading and great vocabulary. We were thrilled she turned to the Vocabulary.com Dictionary as a resource, relying on our explanations of the words to enrich her delightful list.
So thrilled, in fact, that we created a Vocabulary List that gathers her selected words, her notes about them, and the context from which she pulled them all in one place.
Want to add them to your word learning? Click "learn this list" on Vocabulary.com or in the Vocabulary.com app, and you'll start to see questions on those words appear as you play. Or select the "practice" tab on the list to see questions exclusively on these words.
