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No less may be said for Mr. Hubbard’s second key text, Small Common Words Defined. Again, the work reflects a distillation of the language into its fundamental units. The text also reflects his critical discovery that the primary stumbling block to understanding a sentence is not the long and obscure word, but the simple words, e.g., “To,” “The,” “An.” If the point seems minor, it is not; for although one may be able to read and pronounce the sentence “good as gold,” few can actually define the word “as,” and thus lack full comprehension. To further appreciate the problem, one need only open a standard dictionary and examine the various definitions for that word. The grammarian may be satisfied, but the average reader is not—as borne out by Mr. Hubbard’s late 1970s study among college graduates who could not define even the simplest prepositions. Consequently, even common materials read for pleasure—paperback novels, for example—were not fully understood. Thus his conclusion that it was not for want of a so-called powerful vocabulary that one could not effectively communicate; it was a failure to comprehend the building blocks upon which every larger vocabulary must rest.
What Mr. Hubbard’s Small Common Words Defined offers, then, is a full understanding of those building blocks. In all, he defines the sixty most commonly used English words, once more utilizing illustrations for easy comprehension. To then enable the student to build upon that vocabulary, he additionally offers his How to Use a Dictionary. Providing concise explanations of phonetic codes, punctuation, abbreviations and more, How to Use a Dictionary, resolves what most American curriculums never even bother to address: The moment one opens a dictionary, even those for children, one immediately encounters terminology and derivation symbols that are neither generally understood nor adequately explained. Consequently, the student does not even possess the primary means for comprehending language; hence, Mr. Hubbard’s solution for this problem as well.
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