Word Power Made Easy

What Hacker News says

1. mrkgnaoNov 2016
   Huh, that's cool. I wonder if there's any way I can expand my etymology-fu apart from just picking stuff up randomly or learning Latin/Ancient Greek. (I did read Word Power Made Easy as a kid. It kicked off my interest in these things.)
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2. mobattahSep 2025
   Cultural obituaries are often premature, and the one for literacy is no exception. A nascent contrary impulse is emerging: readers deliberately turning to long-form works as a form of intellectual resistance. I’ve been working through Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy and Tom Heehler’s The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, not just to expand vocabulary but to restore the sinew of productive speech.

   That project led me to conscript AI as a private tutor. With custom instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini now surface new words and nudge my prose toward clarity, turning a vague fear of erosion into conviction. A dedicated subset of users will inevitably harness such tools to strengthen their expressive range and communicative precision.

   Until recently, my writing rarely left emails and journals. Now, with AI as scaffold and sparring partner, I draft short stories from my own life and recast them in the voices of authors I admire. This feels less like a technology poised to supplant teachers, and more like the substrate for a renaissance in autodidactic education.

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