Books are helpful in enriching one’s vocabulary. Treatises on rhetoric teach what words should be avoided. The student finds more difficulty in getting enough words to express his thoughts. The study of a good series of readers is more valuable as a means of acquiring a good vocabulary than all the rules on purity, propriety, and so forth, which are found in the text-books on rhetoric. A good series of school readers employs from five to six thousand words. With these the average teacher is familiar to the extent of knowing their meaning when he sees them in sentences. He does not have a sufficient command of a third of them to use them in writing or speaking. The selections of a Fifth Reader contain more words than are found in the vocabulary of any living author. The step from knowing a word when used by another to the ability to use that word in expressing our own thoughts has not been taken in the case of the larger proportion of the words with which we are familiar on the printed page. Most persons use more words in writing than in oral speech, more words in public speaking than in ordinary conversation. We unconsciously absorb many words which we hear others use, but we pick up a far larger number from those we see in print simply because the printed page contains a larger variety of words than spoken language. In this respect there is a vast difference between the oral discourse and the written manuscript of the same person. The style is different; the sentences in oral discourse are less involved; the diction is less complicated; the vocabulary is less copious. Hence the advantage of the boy who has access to standard authors over the youth who has access to few books, and these not well selected. Without any effort, the former gains possession of a vocabulary which makes thinking easier and richer.
The lack of a library of standard authors can be supplied, to some extent, by a judicious use of the school readers. If the mastery of the words and the getting of the thought precede the oral reading of the lesson, and if the vocal utterance is followed by oral and written reproduction of the thought, correct habits of study will be formed, and the working vocabulary of teacher and pupil will be vastly increased. The habit of eying every stranger on the printed page will be fixed, and the appropriation of new words will rise above the subconscious stage. Only one other exercise is comparable,—namely, the comparison of words in a lexicon for the purpose of selecting the right one in making a translation from some ancient or modern language. Such translations, if honestly made, enrich the vocabulary and furnish exercise in the study of the finer shades of meaning which words have, as well as in the use of the words for the purpose of expressing thought.