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Steta Publishers was a writing and brand language consultancy that ran from 2012 to 2016. We are no longer available for projects. Our founders now work here and here. 

Words With Friends

11/1/2016

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Urmilla invited me to a round of Words With Friends, and I found it quite addictive. The little yellow letters make cheerful, bouncy sounds when they move around. It’s fun to try different combinations of letters to see which words scores the most. Words With Friends is the app version of that good ol’ mind bender known as Scrabble. However, I think that the analog version of Scrabble, with its little square letters (lovely wooden ones if you have an old set), is more challenging, and here’s why.
 
Playing in real time. Your opponent/s sat with you, and you had to make sensible words in a limited time frame. With the app, you can take upto several days to decide what word you want to play.
 
Applying your own mental dictionary. While playing Scrabble, you had to have a good dictionary in your head, and you needed to know what words really qualified as words. If you were sharp, you could catch your opponent trying to pass off ‘xo’ as a word. Now, the app tells you if a word is acceptable or not.
 
Doing your own Math. When we played Scrabble, we had to mentally calculate the total number of points we would score. The app does it automatically now. So numerically challenged folks like me are getting even rustier at mental math.
 
Still, Words With Friends lets you play all the time, with friends on other continents. And you suddenly discover the very valuable role of vowels, and how often Q is followed by U. And wonder of wonders, you actually begin to realize that the game is as much about strategy as it is about words. 

By Armeen Kapadia
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The Mental Thesaurus

12/9/2015

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At Steta, one of our proofreaders is a retired gentleman. We’ve noticed a subtle difference between his and our own proofreading skills. People of that generation carry a dictionary and thesaurus with them at all times, inside their heads. The rest of us sometimes tend to resort to double-checking things with online resources. This makes life easy, but it’s also making us terribly dependent on readymade solutions. For instance, someone asks me synonyms of ‘nice’. I can rattle off some, but after a while I’m tempted click my way to an online Merriam Webster or Roget’s. The online medium is a great support system, but we have to be  careful not to become dependent on it.

It was actually a book that got me thinking about all this. It’s called Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis. Each chapter is a series of explanations and exercises, and he makes learning vocabulary a joy. You’ll actually look forward to reading a chapter a day (that’s what he advises), and you only need give it half an hour, at the most. His writing style is conversational, honest and encouraging. The exercises are designed with just the right number of new words that stick in your head, and leave you with a sense of accomplishment and joy at learning something new. He brings to light root words and their meanings, so that we’re not stumped when we come across a rarely used word.

Whether you’re a writer or not, having command over vocabulary, grammar and spelling is always an advantage. This brilliant book is one of the best investments you’ll ever make. Norman Lewis was an author, grammarian, lexicographer
, and etymologist (I learned the exact meaning of that last word in his book). He’s as brilliant a teacher as he is a writer, and this book is a great way to build that dictionary/thesaurus in your head. 

By Armeen Kapadia
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    Authors

    Steta's founders, Urmilla Chandran and Armeen Kapadia author this blog. 

    We love letting our thoughts (crazy, stupid or smart) out for some fresh air.


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