Writers 
Make the Dictionary Your Pal
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are discussing with your peers and all of a sudden the place becomes eerily quiet because you uttered a word that took everyone aback?
Get in let's talk about promoting the dictionary from an acquaintance level to a closer friend level.
I find it fascinating when I not only discover a new word but also inculcate it in my day to day conversations so that I won't easily forget it. Unfortunately, there is a notion that people have created when you tend to sound more fluent or colloquial. You would hear remarks like “She is forming phonetics”, “Americana”, “Ajebo”, and the likes. Please do not let such remarks make you recoil, instead strive harder, because you are making a name for yourself, you are carving out your own niche, you are veering towards excellence.
As we all are aware, our contemporary world is a competitive one, and you can only thrive in it when you exude excellence, this excellence is not achieved in a day, rather it is built intentionally. Why not dust that dictionary now? It is probably in your phone currently but you've forgotten of its existence, this is the right time to revisit it.
One good thing about checking up words is that it enables you to do away with “clichés”. There are better synonyms for words that have been used constantly overtime, this gives you an edge over every other person that settles for the average. In your conversations, your contents whatsoever, your presentation of words would sound more polished and attractive.
More fortunate for us, we are in the era of AI, and inasmuch as it is highly abused, it has a good side which can be leveraged. If we feel too lazy to come up with synonyms or we find it too cumbersome to comprehend the definition of a word, we can prompt whatever AI we are using to explain such words for us in a layman's term and show us how to use them correctly in a sentence.
Making the dictionary a close pal also spurs your level of confidence in what you are doing, and sometimes you end up articulating words that make people inadvertently run back to their dictionaries.
Mastering new words isn't enough, mastering the right pronunciation is also very pivotal. Take for instance you found a new word, let's say “Rendezvous” and you are like “Bingo! I've found a new word to add to my wealth of vocabularies” and you end up pronouncing it as “Ren-dez-vos”, that would be a horrible disaster especially when there are people around that know the right pronunciation but leave you in the dark or take side glances to capitalize on your ignorance, rather than correct you. Therefore, the best way to be on the safer side is to also find out how the words we discover are pronounced.
In conclusion, let us kindly do away with the mentality that the English language is not our mother tongue and therefore excuse our lack of good conversational structure to the fact that we were not born with the language or it is the language of the colonizers, hence we want to combat neocolonialism. The English language has spiraled to a great pitch in the world today, and intentionally grabbing the opportunity to refine yours would place you on a better advantage.
