Puneetha writes:

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Hello uncle, how can I improve my vocabulary?Please suggest some ways where I can make my article small and precise.how shall I end a letter to the Editor regarding some issue like"scarcity of water"
thank you.

Firstly, corrections to the note above: 'uncle' should be written with a capital U, there should be a space after the question mark, instead of 'where' some other word (or different structure) should be used, like 'how'. There are a couple of more mistakes too, try to find them ! Don't feel bad that I pointed them out ! It is just a learning thing.

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Dear Puneetha,
Thanks for writing and apologies for not noticing your comment for a long time. Your questions are pretty broad ! Not easy to give exact or clear answers.

How to improve your vocabulary ? I must admit I don't have a simple answer to this. Looking back at my own experience, I used to read a lot so I got exposed to many new words. I never used to go to the dictionary and look up the word's meaning. This was not a very good thing, as I just used to try to guess the meaning of the word from the sentence or the context where I read it. So sometimes I got only a vague idea or a wrong idea about the meaning of a word. However after bumping into a word enough times, usually things got sorted out. Getting the pronunciation right was much harder -- living in my world of books I rarely heard the words being actually said, so I came up with all kinds of funny pronunciations for words.
There are some more 'artificial' ways to try to improve vocabulary like learning a list of new words and trying to use them in sentences. This is probably good, but it is harder to do and does not come naturally. I would be interested to hear from you and other students what kinds of things they try to do to improve their vocabulary and what are the results.
Do think about this too -- to write good essays, perhaps it is more important to research or think through carefully about what you are saying, express it clearly and logically and have good grammer, than use many big words. As long as you have enough vocabulary to express your thoughts effectively, that should be enough !

How to make your article small and precise ? I think you would need to be clear in your own mind about what you are trying to convey in the article. Normally we are not too clear so then we beat around the bush and talk about different things and the article becomes wordy and diffuse and not precise. So if you can prepare for writing the article by first saying "this is what I want this article to be about", it may help in focussing your writing.

Regarding your question - How shall I end a letter to the editor on some issue like "Scarcity of water" ? Nothing special is needed I think, for example, something like:

Sincerely,
Puneetha
Class X, Only Games School,
Swarganagar
Email: puneetha@english.com

should suffice.

Do write again with your questions !

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A nice picture, just to add some variety to the post:




It was taken at the Kolkata Maidan, a huge open space in the middle of Kolkata.