Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

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generally, good writers are good readers. Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced (which is often the case when someone relies on a thesaurus). I don't think too many are surprised that mathematicians get perfect scores on the math part of the SAT, so I dunno why writers scoring equally well on the verbal is different. Yeah obv. being a mathematician is a lot more involved than scoring well on a test, but it shows potential.

I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted. A large vocab requires a strong crystallized memory, which is a part of IQ. Most people when they encounter new words either are unable to infer the meaning and or forget it, but smart people do both.

>I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted.

The fact that IQ and vocabulary are correlated across a population doesn't imply that, and it's clearly not true unless you don't think someone can learn a new language later in life. Or you think that a person can learn 10k new words in a new language, but not an extra few thousand in their existing language?

>Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced

Yes competent writing requires some minimum vocabulary. It doesn't require a vocabulary sufficient to score near perfect on the SAT. Most writers limit the vocabulary they use to match their target audience, so having a much larger vocabulary than your target audience isn't going to be that useful.

Especially for a lot of day-to-day writing about technical topics, ornate writing with long sentences, complicated punctuation, and SAT words is mostly discouraged. I'll slip a non-basic word in here and there but I generally keep my writing relatively short and sweet--and my editors tend to steer it in that direction as well to its benefit.

>vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted.

Yet, from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient):

>Raw scores on IQ tests for many populations have been rising at an average rate that scales to three IQ points per decade since the early 20th century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect.

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