Improving your vocabulary will bring you many benefits: first, you’ll be more confident speaking in public and more comfortable talking with people in social and professional settings. Second, you’ll be able to progress faster in your educational goals due to your ability to understand advanced texts and materials, and discuss them intelligently. Third (but definitely not last), your increased verbal skills will bring you to the attention of management as well as your peers, and you’ll be able to take your place at the head of the line when promotions are due. However, you’ll need to spend some time working on vocabulary improvement to realize these results, and that may mean changing the way you study. It’s especially important to reserve some time and space for yourself, in a quiet space without distractions. In other words, you need to sequester yourself away from interruption to get the most out of your vocabulary practice.

The verb sequester hasn’t changed much from the original Latin sequestrare (“to keep safe”). To sequester someone (or something) means to isolate them so that they are not affected by any outside influence. For example, juries get sequestered during a trial so that they aren’t swayed by media coverage or other people’s opinions, or just random things they hear about a case that may or may not be accurate. To be truly impartial, a jury must be focused only on what they hear in the courtroom, so they are set apart from everyone else.

In the last few decades, the noun sequestration has gained more attention, because of the increasing worries over global warming. The process of carbon sequestration is sometimes proposed as a possible method of reducing the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A certain amount of sequestration happens happens naturally, such as when trees capture carbon dioxide, or the earth or the oceans absorb it, and this natural process can be helped along by planting cover crops or plowing under fields instead of burning them after harvest (the burning puts the carbon back into the atmosphere). Mechanical methods for doing the same thing are being discussed, but the technology has not advanced far enough to make such storage safe, since leaks of pure carbon dioxide can be fatal, suffocating people and animals.

When you’re studying vocabulary, you’ll want to sequester yourself in a quiet space so that you can concentrate. Noise and distraction will slow your ability to learn new words and remember them, and you’ll probably find yourself going over the same material extra times because you can’t remember what you’ve been studying after an interruption. If roommates or family members are around, try to find a time when no one is home, or ask their cooperation in helping you study. If you really can’t control the noise around you, try using noise-canceling headphones, or play low-key instrumental music in the background to help cover up outside noises. By setting aside time to study, and setting yourself apart so you can focus on your studies, you’ll get the most out of your vocabulary study.