Tips on How to Improve SAT Vocabulary

Alexis Avila, Founder/President of Prepped & Polished, discusses vocabulary memorization shortcuts for the SAT.

First: Complete the vocabulary quizzes as well as tests in Word Smart and Word Smart 2 by The Princeton Review.
Second: Transfer words you don’t know onto a list.
Third: Make vocabulary flashcards from this list.
Fourth: Memorize the vocabulary flashcard stack.
Fifth: Come back to the vocabulary flashcard stack a few days later to make sure the words stick.

Memorizing SAT vocab and vocab in general usually takes a long time. You’re going to have to read a lot and play a lot of Scrabble. But the chances are your SAT is around the corner, and you’re not going to have a lot of time to read War and Peace. So here’s a shortcut method to memorizing tons of SAT vocab words.

So, what I want you to do is buy the Word Smart I and Word Smart I II series by Princeton Review and take all the quizzes and tests in these books. Go over the words that you missed (that you got wrong in the words) that you were hazy on, and transfer all those words onto a big list of words. Now, take the list of words and transfer them to flashcards. On one side of the flashcard, you’re going to have the word. On the other side, you’re going to have not only the definition of the word but also a sentence using the word in context.

Then what you’re going to do is play a flash card game where you’re simply going to go through the stack of flashcards and you’re going to separate them into two piles: a pile of words that you know in a pile of words you don’t know. In the name of the game, it is basically to get the pile of words that you don’t know down to nothing.

Finally, I want you to step aside and take a couple of days off from the vocab. Come back to the big list of vocabulary words and go through that stack again. If you can nail all the words, great. But if you missed a few words going through that stack after taking two days off, that means that you really have to study those words because they haven’t sucked sunk into the long-term memory yet, so you got to keep practicing.

So try this shortcut way to memorize SAT vocab, and I’ll talk to you soon. Good luck.

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