Developing Your Vocabulary
As a college student you will necessarily learn an enormous number of new words. It makes sense. You will be learning new ideas, new subject content, new phenomena. And new things require new names. Besides, the professional fields tend to draw their language from the more formal portions of the English word-stock, and this often means multi-syllabic words derived from Latin and Greek roots.
So how do you plan to manage this learning of words?
First, you should decide on a strategy for what to do about unfamiliar words that you encounter in your reading.
One strategy is to keep a dictionary at hand and look the new words up. By the way, the best hardback dictionary for college purposes is the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.
You won't always have time to consult a dictionary, however. In this case, or if you don't have a dictionary handy, you do have some alternatives. These include asking someone what the word means, skipping the unknown word altogether, or guessing at its meaning. Often you can guess successfully based on the context. Do not, however, get hung up on the word. One mark of a good reader is his or her tolerance for ambiguity in a text (at least temporarily).
Second, you should decide on how you can proactively increase your word power.
There are many commercial texts on the market that can help you to broaden both the set of vocabulary that you recognize and the smaller set that you actually use.
Short of using such a text, you can decide to teach yourself new words by writing them down, looking them up, and reviewing them. I kept such lists throughout college and profited enormously from them (the last word I remember writing on the list was "truculent," which means "disposed to fight " or "pugnacious." Cool word.)
Those who have studied Latin have a definite advantage, given how many English words derive from that language. For example, if you studied Latin and remember that pugnus means "fist," you'll have no trouble decoding "pugnacious" when you run across it. (The system is not foolproof, however. I studied Latin and should have remembered that truc- is a Latin root meaning "fierce." If I had, I wouldn't have had to write "truculent" down on my list and look it up).
If you didn't study Latin, you can still learn the important roots. See the next section.