A twist in the Wordlist Tale!

Bored with wordlist? Great, then you will read my blog. Wait, even if you are not, trust me, you need this! We have already taught you several ways of working with the wordlist with a strong instruction of DO NOT CRAM!

Yet some words remain in your mind. Some tease you as you do remember studying them but forget their meanings. Others would bog you down as they keep confusing you.  How much you hate those words!

How do I know this? Oh that’s simple. It happens with me too all the time. Yet that never really stops me from working with the wordlist. The more I forget words, the more I try to discover newer ways of studying words.

Today, I wish to share with you one such innovative way, if I may call it so, to remember words. During the start of the year, I did a little experiment with one of my RGPV specific batches. Since they kept cribbing over newer problems that they faced while doing the wordlist, I gave them my trump card.

I handed them an assignment that they would eventually remember for the rest of their year. I just picked up the first few pages of our (old) wordlist. I asked them to weave a story across a few characters and scenes using ALL the words from those pages. The scene was of Kaun Banega Karodpati. Characters were Mr Amitabh Bachchan and guest contestant Preity Zinta.

I still remember many funny stories, which this enthusiastic bunch of students submitted to me. They all exercised their creative skills to pen fictitious stories that had all the words from the assigned pages. “Mukti, I had to create situations to fit those words in the story you know!” shared one of the students. Well that’s exactly what my purpose was!

A few boys also ‘inserted’ Anil Kapoor in their tales squeezing excerpts from Slumdog Millionaire; some students wrote systematically as if they were writing a one-act play; others simply replaced Preity Zinta with Shahrukh Khan.  A students used the word ‘appellation’ for Big B; another used ‘adage’ for a question asked by Big B to Preity; ‘apropos’ for the way other contestants behaved. And the rest, as the batch still tells me, is HISTORY!

That day, I too got a lesson. There is no ONE way to remember words. And that’s the best part of it. We have very MANY ways to help us browse through the beautiful world of words. Through this simple exercise, all of us discovered a new way. Those words easily got into our lives since that assignment.  If it worked for us, it would for you too.

So here’s the deal.  Try writing a story using a page of wordlist. The idea is to make you sit and spend some creative time with words.  It would just take half an hour. But I bet, you wouldn’t forget those words ever!

For more such pills on wordlist, watch this space! 

By Mukti Masih