R is for Research -- Day 18 of the "A to Z Blogging Challenge"

I love doing research. I love it on the internet. I love it in a library. I love it in books. To me, research is like a treasure hunt.

I learned to research when I could barely read. We had a set of encyclopedias when I was growing up. It was old, and one volume was missing, but I loved it. I also loved the huge dictionary Mama bought later on. It weighed about twenty-five pounds. It wasn't just a dictionary. It had a thesaurus, measurement conversion charts, and Spanish-English, French-English, and German-English dictionaries in the appendices. I learned to research using these beloved books.

I would pick a volume of the encyclopedia at random and flip through it until I found something that looked interesting. I would read the entry, and write down the references at the end, then I would look them up and read them. I could entertain myself for an entire day this way.

After we got the dictionary, I expanded my research hobby to use it. I learned words from it that other people my age had never heard of. I didn't know about things my classmates knew, like sex and current trends, but I knew a lot of other things. I learned that the other languages in the dictionary had a lot of similarities to English. Once I spent a whole weekend looking for the longest word in the dictionary.
Hmmmm... I wonder my desire to write has to do with my love of books as a child. Probably so.