Four steps to building your journalistic topic vocabulary.

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Here are four steps to building your journalistic topic vocabulary.

First, take a focussed approach by reading articles on the topics you write about. This will allow you to gain exposure to and learn a lot of relevant vocabulary that you can use in your writing. For example, if you are a sports journalist, then read lots of news and feature articles on sport. This is the fastest and most efficient way to improve. 

Second, notice important high-frequency words in the articles instead of trying to understand and learn all the words in the article. Start by trying to understand the main ideas before noticing important vocab that expresses these ideas as well as supporting ideas. What you highlight should be words that are very familiar to your audience and that you will often use in your writing. 

Third, record the words in their context. Don’t record lists of words out of context with their translation. Context is fundamental to making words meaningful. Without it, you are less likely to remember new vocabulary. Then, you can add a translation, if necessary, to complement the context and be sure of the exact meaning.

Fourth, choose 7-10 new words to revise repeatedly over a period of 24 to 48 hours. This is a reasonable number of words to handle at a time as you don’t want to overload your memory or overwhelm yourself. Also, when you record some new words, revising over the next 24-48 hours is essential to storing them in your memory. If you delay beyond that, it might be as if you came across those words for the very first time. Finally, aim to revise the new vocab around ten times within that period. This should be enough to firmly store it in your memory.