Word Workout: Building a Muscular Vocabulary in 10 Easy Steps

Word Workout: Building a Muscular Vocabulary in 10 Easy Steps by Charles Harrington Elster

This book is built as a study guide to help you learn new vocabulary. You could use it that way. However, I found it worked great reading straight through. It presented a variety of words in context with proper pronunciation and a look at their history. Some of these are fairly common words. Others are rarities. The author is strongly opinionated as to the elimination of "redundancy" in speech. While it may be fine if everyone is "in" on the rare word, redundancy does help when you want to drop a rare word and still let those not in the know understand. Being concise can sometimes be the enemy of being understood.