Customer Reviews

Word Smart, 4th Edition (Smart Guides)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I really thought that the authors of this book compiled a list of 1,505 formidable looking words that I would certainly never see again in my life. I was very wrong.

All (yes, all, not almost all) of these words appear at some point in our daily lives, even if it's rare to hear some of the words in this book used in everyday speech. When I was an AP English student in high school, I noticed that the words in this book frequently appear in the writings of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens - and even in contemporary writings, such as those of J.K. Rowling. These words commonly appear in major newspapers and magazines such as Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and these words are bound to appear in any professional writing or documents. I sincerely believe that if you go through these words in the book, you will very seldom find the need to refer to your dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word.

While these words prove beneficial to our daily lives, Word Smart is an ideal choice for those who are still attending high school or college. If your mind is set on memorizing these words (especially helpful for those preparing to take the SAT or other standardized tests), I strongly recommend that you read Harry Lorayne's Page-a-Minute Memory Book, which is actually recommended by the authors of this book in Chapter 1. Not only will it help you memorize the 1,505 words in this book, but it will also prove exceptionally helpful, inside and outside of your academic career.

I hope my review of this book is helpful. You will not regret this purchase; by the end, you'll want to begin Word Smart II, 3rd Edition (Smart Guides)!

UPDATE 4/11/2010 -- KINDLE VERSION REVIEW --
I would give the Kindle version of Word Smart two out of five stars. It is incredibly frustrating to repeatedly hit the "next Page" to simply get to the next alphabetical group of words! I recommend to Amazon to add an option inside the Table of Contents that would allow the reader to quickly access any alphabetical group of words ("A," "B," "C," etc.). For the meantime, I'll stick to my hard copy.

Word Smart: Building an Educated Vocabulary
Word Smart II: How to Build a More Powerful Vocabulary
by Adam Robinson
Word Smart for Business: Cultivating a Six Figure Vocabulary
by Paul West Brook

These three books are permanently placed on my working desk, next to my portable computer. I find them very useful as reference guides to writing smart.

The first two books have a combined inventory of almost 1,700 important words. They have been written by Adam Robinson & The Princeton Review Team. As some readers may know, Adam Robinson happens to be also the author of 'What Smart Students Know' a very good book about smart study techniques. The two books are originally targetted at students preparing for SAT & other standardised tests, but I find them very useful for working professionals.

The third book has an inventory of over 4,000 important business terms, covering quite a broad spectrum of business disciplines. It has been written by a noted financial planning expert.

I enjoy browsing these three books from time to time. I often refer to them as I write my daily business correspondence as well as my reviews on amazon website.

I strongly recommend these three books to readers who want to communicate effectively, be more persuasive & more importantly, get more from your reading.

This book has plenty of important words that show up frequently on the SAT. The authors provide good definitions and examples to help you understand them. But reading the book alone won't get you far, its necessary to make flash cards and re memorize the words again and again.

In high school they used Word Smart as part of the curriculum for SAT prep. At the time we hated it, but now as an adult I'm glad that I saved the book in my parents' closet because I dug it out to use once again as a reference. The book is well-organized, well-written, and a fantastic resource. As a writer I have started studying this book once again, and will probably buy Volume II soon.

It's basically a mini dictionary. It does take a lot of dedication to go threw this book. I just finished the book after about 8 months. I actually made flashcards with each word with Anki. It's a spaced repetition that helps schedule the next time you should review. Trust me, without scheduled flashcards programs like this, you will forget a lot of words within a month or two. The key is to keep reviewing the flashcards in the future. This book isn't comprehensive. The publisher has a product that contains 500 GRE flashcards; get that if you want paper flashcards. They have a Word Smart #2 that you can get which should be part of this anyways. Then they have a GRE Word Smart. God damn it, just make one Word Smart book. I have seen lots of the words as I read more. Also, if you don't have one already, get yourself one of the new Kindles for 189 bucks. It has a in-line dictionary that will help you on your quest to learn new words. Unfortunately, The 800 of so words in this book isn't all you need. I think a book with 2000 words would be ideal. Guess I may have to get the other book. Have fun.

I live in the UAE, thus most of my books are bought via kindle to maximize accessibility and minimize cost. I own dozens of fiction and nonfiction kindle books.

Unfortunately, this book is a classic example of a nonfiction book that was dumped into an electronic file with no regard for formatting or even a perfunctory edit. Do the publishers even look at the book before they whack it up for sale on the kindle store?

Instead of a simple matching exercise, the quizzes have become a jumbled and garbled mess of misaligned words. It is difficult to toggle back and forth between the answer key and the quiz. After 20 minutes of pencil and paper work, I am still not sure what my score was on many of the quizzes!

Get the print edition or wait until the kinks are worked out. Better yet, buy a used copy for 35 cents and stick it in a scanner to make a PDF file. Do not waste ten dollars of your money when the publishers could not be bothered to spend the ten minutes it would have taken to create a readable, user friendly book in it's entirety.

The good news is that apparently amazon has a 7 day no questions asked return policy on all kindle content. I'm about to put that to the test and try to return my first kindle book.

A congenial manuscript filled with a copious, yet eclectic, word list that is conducive to augmenting one's aptitude in erudite dialectics. It's a great book.

I have several other books on vocabulary. I rate this book as one of the best and now indispensable as well.

I am an SAT coach and provide a copy of this book to each of my clients with excellent results. I have been doing this for 5 years and will continue to do so. For more advanced students, I use the Word Smart II

The book had a useful Chapter One that gave a detailed example using the word "cheap." It showed how to use a thesaurus to find additional synonyms. It then used a dictionary to define the shades of meanings of the selected synonyms and then described the denotations and connotations of the words to determine which best fit the example. By the time this exercise was completed we had covered about 24 possible words that could be used for "cheap" and learned the shades of meanings very well for those words. I then assumed that this methodology would be used for all 1000 or so words that the book intended to cover but I was disappointed. Chapter Two (The Words), which is the bulk of the book, then proceeded to list each of the words in an alphabetic order, with a short definition of each and an example or two using each word. Every 11 or so words a Quick Quiz was given of the words just covered. Unfortunately, the answers given for each quiz bore little relationship to what the answers should be. To make matter worse, the formatting of the 86 Quick Quizzes didn't present well on the Kindle (nor on my PC using a Kindle app)and the answers were formatted differently so it made checking your answers difficult, which didn't matter much because as stated earlier the answers were usually incorrect. If one wants an alphabetic listing (with definitions and examples) of the 1000 or so words likely to appear on a SAT then the book might have some value; for me it rated one star.