According to Steve Kaufmann of LingQ, a company that provides web-based language tutoring, the most accurate predictor of earning power is literacy. Literacy is not just being able to read – it also refers to your command of written language. By improving yours, you can increase both your IQ and the amount of cash in your pocket.
How can you do it without single-handedly raising Kaplan’s stock price? Kaufmann suggests copying a sample page from a source or article that interests you and pasting it into Google Documents. You can find several readability indicators under File/Word Count, including the Automated Reader Index, which indicates the number of years of schooling required to understand a text. The beauty of the web is that you can keep challenging yourself with harder and harder material until you are comfortable with content that is at an index of 12 or 15 or higher.
You should also measure the richness of your vocabulary. Cut and paste a sample article into a web-based Vocabulary Profiler. Using this kind of tool, you can see how many of the piece’s words are within the 1000 most frequently used words, how many are “academic” (AWL), and how many are “off-list.” Kaufmann recommends getting to the point where you are comfortable reading material that has 10 percent or more words in the AWL and the off-list categories.
Don’t forget that you can use online dictionaries and word learning programs to increase your vocabulary. When you come across a word that you don’t know, get into the habit of looking it up immediately, and also check out the related words in man’s other best friend – the thesaurus!
More reading! Man, I always hated reading :)
Posted by: DC Jobs | August 19, 2010 at 05:11 PM
@DC Jobs: Ah, you can never escape it!
Posted by: Alexandra Levit | September 22, 2010 at 06:05 PM