Recommendations for building verbal skills: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 02:54, 31 January 2014

See verbal skills: benefits for more on why it is important to build verbal skills.

Below are some general recommendations for building verbal skills:

Read

Reading can help build verbal skills in the following ways:

It helps one add important words, concepts, and frameworks to one's pool of mental knowledge, thereby making it easier to understand other material that relies on similar ideas.
By seeing how other people have crafted an argument, one gets some second-hand experience in doing so.

However, it is not generally advisable to read books solely for the purpose of building verbal skills, that one would not otherwise have read. Rather, read books, articles, blogs, and other materials that offer quality exposition of topics that you are interested in. The reason is two-fold:

Reading serves a dual purpose: one is simultaneously learning about a topic of importance and building general verbal skills.
If one is interested in learning something, then one pays closer attention to the material and engages with it more critically.

If you're not sure what to start reading, consider looking at our core reading recommendations.

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-Just like mathematical skills, verbal skills are extremely important both for performing well as a student and in later life. In fact, verbal skills are more likely to be useful in a wide range of jobs on a day-to-day basis. As an example, drafting emails and writing up documents is part of the routine in many skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Having sufficiently strong verbal skills to be able to execute these tasks twice as fast means a substantial boost to one's overall productivity.
+See [[verbal skills: benefits]] for more on why it is important to build verbal skills.
-Verbal skills include:
+Below are some general recommendations for building verbal skills:
-* Strong vocabulary
+==Read==
-* Skills of comprehension and interpretation (reading passages, grasping key points, being able to answer questions about them)
-* Analytical skills: Being able to synthesize and manipulate ideas expressed verbally
-* Skills of expression and exposition
-Note that although ''verbal'' and ''math'' skills are often considered two different ends of the intellectual skill spectrum, verbal skills can be quite useful in mathematics. In particular, the verbal analytical skills strongly overlap with skills used in higher mathematics, such as skills of proof discovery.
+Reading can help build verbal skills in the following ways:
-Although primary language classes (such as English language classes in the United States) are often considered the main place to build verbal skills, it is worth noting that these classes may not be the most efficient way to build verbal skills -- although they have other benefits such as exposing students to quality literature and ideas.
+* It helps one add important words, concepts, and frameworks to one's pool of mental knowledge, thereby making it easier to understand other material that relies on similar ideas.
+* By seeing how other people have crafted an argument, one gets some second-hand experience in doing so.
+However, it is not generally advisable to read books solely for the purpose of building verbal skills, that one would not otherwise have read. Rather, read books, articles, blogs, and other materials that offer quality exposition of topics that you are interested in. The reason is two-fold:
+* Reading serves a dual purpose: one is simultaneously learning about a topic of importance and building general verbal skills.
+* If one is interested in learning something, then one pays closer attention to the material and engages with it more critically.
+If you're not sure what to start reading, consider looking at our [[core reading recommendations]].
+==Write==