Customer Reviews

Word Smart for Business: Cultivating a Six-figure Vocabulary (Smart Guides)

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I am writing TOEIC test preparation materials and checked this book out (the 1999 version, which is 474 pages long) to help me design a business-oriented vocabulary book for ESL students. Basically, Word Smart for Business is a 4,000 entry, A-Z style dictionary. The entries are all assigned to one of twelve categories: Accounting, Business and Management, Computers and Communications, Economics, Finance, Human Resources, Insurance, Legal, Math, Real Estate, Business Slang, and Taxes. While Mr. Westbrook does include a variety of terms from each of the above categories, I did not find Word Smart for Business too helpful in my TOEIC designing task. First, I think Word Smart needs some sort of organizational scheme; perhaps the words could be organized by category or theme. A thematic organizational approach would have made the book more user friendly, in my opinion. Next, there seem to be more than a few random words (especially in the "slang" and "math" categories) in Word Smart that have little to do with business or business English. For example, while it's true that slang terms such as "no brainer" and "out to lunch" are sometimes used in a business context, aren't they just as often used in other contexts? Likewise, including math terms like the Pythagorean Theorem and the algebraic distributive law was also puzzling to me. Do people actually use these math terms in a business context? On a positive note, I liked some of the interesting charts and comics that were included with the terms. I found myself wishing there were more visuals like this in Word Smart. I was also not sure who the audience for this book was: It seems too basic for someone who is hardcore in their business knowledge, but too random and complicated for a business ESL-type student. Word Smart for Business has some interesting material, but needs a clearer focus.

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.

Want to know what currency they use in Egypt? You won't find the Pound in the list of currencies. Want to know what the Coase Theorem is about? There is no excuse for omitting Coase and 4 others arbitrarily from the list of Nobel laureates, as Ronald Coase got his award in 1991. James Tobin was included, but there is no mention of the Tobin Tax, as the concept gained prominence a few years AFTER this book was published in 1999.

As a reference work, this book fails miserably. As a literary work, the definitions are inelegant and clumsy. It is categorically not a dictionary. It is nerd-speak at its best. It needs someone with the skill of Samuel Johnson to refine and polish up the English.

But WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. The stated aim on the cover is "CULTIVATING" a vocabulary for business. It is wildly successful in this respect. It exposes the reader to new words and alternative definitions of ordinary words, like "bus" being a computer pathway between devices.

If your object is to learn something, this work has little overlap with other compendiums of words. It is rare and unusual.

Five stars for words like "Journeyman" which I thought was related to the musical wanderings of Eric Clapton's best selling album.
"Estoppel" was defined as "a restraint..." and in decades of using my favourite legal defence, I have not seen "estoppel" defined in this refreshing way.
"Freddie Mac" and "Fannie Mae" (Federal National Morgage Association) were useful inclusions.
The definition of "transfer tax" was spot on, and I have yet to find such a concise and accurate definition in any book on taxation.
"Laffer Curve", "ampersand", "Ponzi Scheme", are good refreshers of things you already know. Terms like "r correlation co-efficient" and "401(k)" are good memory joggers: there is a load of stuff which makes you go "yeah, I used to know that well - now let me check if my memory is still good".
My favourite definition was the lovely one for "reality check": a prompt return to realistic expectations after a period of fanciful thinking.
"Analysis paralysis" is also a good one.

I fail to see the relevance of the inclusion of ORDINARY words in the absence of a business context, like "cul-de-sac". More patronising is the inclusion of 2 diagrams to illustrate "right angle" which I think is 4th grade mathematics. An illustration of the Dvorak keyboard, on the other hand, would be interesting.

In the place of words which can be found in any other vocabulary compendium, I would have liked to see the expansion of terms commonly seen in business, like the German gmbh and AG companies, the European Spa, or the French SA (Societe Anonyme). "Withholding" present, "withholding tax" absent, the latter more useful in international business. "Lis pendens" should add what this does to your credit rating. There are too many legal definitions from Criminal Law, compared to sparse representation from Business Law. White collar criminals would not have time to be reading this book and already have legal firms on their retainers. "De minimis" is commonly mispronounced and would benefit from a pronouncing guide. Put it in the entire latin context "de minimis non curat lex" as well.

I am not sure if I am comfortable with the definition of "Delphi method" which might be misleading when over-condensed, and its antonym "Groupthink", a term introduced by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s, was excluded. "Arbitrage" was defined clumsily: I get the meaning, but I want something more educational for such an important term. The next edition should include the use of super-computers in arbitrage.

Lehman Brothers Bond Index is now black humour and should be marked "H" for historical term. "Pacific Rim" and "Asian Rim" misses countries like Peru, Chile, New Zealand, and notably Russia, which was not mentioned in either term. Russia is often overlooked, so you need to point it out specifically. APEC, "four adjectives in search of a noun", which Obama attended in 2009, but was present at the time of the 1999 printing, would have been a useful inclusion.

JPEG was defined, but this book needs updating to include "steganography" which often uses JPEGs for encryption by electronic watermarking. A lot of stuff was of course non-existent in 1999, the year of publication of this book. You do not need to be told a decade is a long time in business - "Paralipsis": a technical sounding word which has no business in this book.

My feedback to editors producing the next edition:

(1) Ruthlessly weed out everyday vocabulary words like "alibi", "damages", and go straight for "punitive damages", "aggravated damages" which is more in the ambit and scope of a book cultivating business vocabulary.
(2) Get your lists complete, because it is not your business to decide for the reader what would be relevant to their interests.
(3) Make this book more reader friendly. Less nerd-speak. More memorable sound-bites. Get the liberal arts people to refine the language. For definitions I am not comfortable with, or for technical concepts I need to deal with in detail, I can resort to the INTERNET. With the Internet as your competitor, keep in mind at all times Russell Crowe's exhortation in Gladiator: "Are you not entertained? Is this not what you came for?" You claim you are cultivating a business vocabulary, for goodness sake, not compiling a dictionary (and a bad one at that).

This book rates FIVE STARS for raising awareness to the parallel universe of business jargon. It is an affordable read. It is hard to find a similar book in this price band, Barron's being far more conservative. For the next edition, I expect to be entertained, not stare at a collection of words looking like links to the internet.