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Give us 15 Minutes A Day
Your boss has a bigger vocabulary than you have.
That's one good reason why he's your boss.
This discovery has been made in the word laboratories of the world. Not by theoretical English professors, but by practical, hard-headed scholars who have been searching for the secrets of success.
After a host of experiments and years of testing they have found out:
That if your vocabulary is limited your chances of success are limited.
That one of the easiest and quickest ways to get ahead is by consciously building up your knowledge of words.
That the vocabularyl of the average person almost stops growing by the middle twenties. And that from then on it is necessary to have an intelligent plan if progress is to be made. No haphazard hit-or-miss methods will do.
It has long since been satisfactorily established that a high executive does not have a large vocabulary merely because of the opportunities of his position. That would be putting the cart before the horse. Quite the reverse is true. His skill in words was a tremendous help in getting him his job.
Dr.Johnson O';Connor of thee Human Engineering Laboratory of Boston and of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, gave a vocabulary test to 100 young men who were studying to be industrial executives.
Five years later those who had passed in the upper ten percent all., without exception, had executive positions, while not a single young man of the lower twenty-five per cent had become an executive.
You see, there are certain factors in success that can be measured as scientifically as the contents of a test-tube, and it has been discovered that the most common characteristic of outstanding success is "an extensive knowledge of the exact meaning of English words".
The extent of your vocabulary indicates the degree of your intelligence. Your brain power will increase as you learn to know more words. Here's the proof.
Two classes in a high school were selected for an experiment. Their ages and their environment were the same. Each class represented an identical cross-section of the community. One, the control class, took the normal courses. The other class was given special vocabulary training. At the end of the period the marks of the latter class surpassed those of the control group, not only in English, but in every subject, including mathematics and the sciences.
Similarly it has been found by Professor Lewis M.Terman, of Stanford University, that a vocabulary test is as accurate a measure of intelligence as any three units of the standard and accepted Stanford-Binet I.Q.tests.
The study of words is not merely something that has to do with literature. Words are your tools of thought. You can't even think at all without them. Try it. If you are planning to go down town this afternoon you will find that you are saying to yourself:"I think I will go down town this afternoon." You can't make such a simple decision as this without using words.
Without words you could make no decisions and from no judgments whatsoever. A pianist may have the most beautiful tunes in his head, but if he had only five keys on his piano he would never get more than a fraction of these tunes out. |