dictonary writing exercise

so this morning i did a writing exercise to just keep my mind working. this comes from the same book i talked about in this post, the daily writer by fred white. i put two different exercises into one. one was to build your vocabulary list and then the other was the at random open up the dictionary and jot down any word you didn't know and then use it in a poem. so i put them together and opened up the dictionary at random and wrote down any words i didn't know into my notebook. then after i have a bunch of different words i tried to use them in different sentences.

for example: ripsnorter - something extraordinary. sentence: marianne's wedding dress was ripsnorter.

so i did a bunch of those. and while writing those sentences different ideas come to me about what kind of story i would write that would use these kinds of words. i remember doing things like this in middle school and high school. and it seems like just busy work, but i think it is a valuable tool (now that i'm older) to help build my vocabulary skills.

ps- when i used spell check for this post, blogger said that ripsnorter wasn't a word.