<p>Okay i'm looking to increase my reading and writing scores from 500's to 700's, my math score is perfect so i don't need help with that</p>
<p>VOCABULARY-what book, magazine, or such would u say would be best way to memorize most common vocab quickly and easily. Is vocablary cartoon 2 good choice cuz it has pics and mnemonics for most common sat words</p>
<p>Critical reading- would you say barrons is the best book for critical reading, plz list ur success stories and what book or other things would u use to prepare</p>
<p>WRITING- for writing what would be recomended book</p>
<p>SAT-what is overall best sat book? Blue college board book?</p>
<p>5 MONTHs-I can dedicate hour to hour and half day studding for next five months, do yall have any study plans, or any books that come with it, or anywhere u can find it?</p>
<p>SUMMER-also studding summer for retake in fall what would be good summer study guide, i can dedicate 2 to 3 hrs a day.</p>
<p>For critical reading, personally I don't think there's a right or wrong way for the passage questions. I read the questions first and i put a dot next to all the lines referenced in the questions so when i read the parts I marked off I really focus, then immediately answer that question, and continue reading. Then when you're done, you will have read the whole passage and can answer the questions that ask for tone and overall purpose etc.</p>
<p>Also the Princeton Review book has good vocab in the back, but I really don't know if it's the best vocab resource.</p>
<p>I started off doing math cr and writing in the princeton review book, and after I finished the whole thing I switched to the College Board book just because I trust that one more than the others.</p>
<p>I liked Princeton Review's WordSmart book for vocab. Just read it whenever/wherever you are - on the bus, eating dinner, etc. Vocab is hard to just sit down and memorize but it's a lot easier when you are not sitting down at your desk and forcing a million words down your throat.</p>
<p>Also read like crazy! Read whatever! Set your homepage to nytimes.com READ! Best thing to do. And it doesn't even really matter what you read. I pick up a lot of words from blogs I read, and those are things I enjoy reading. Just look up every word you don't know and maybe make a journal of all the words you collect.</p>
<p>As for reading, I had trouble with that too, but I just buckled down with College Board's Blue Book (yes, definitely the best book -- right from the source) and did all the tests, then went over ALL the passages a lot of times to see if I could see any patterns in the CR. Do the quick scan of the passage first - first sentence of first paragraph, last sentence of first paragraph, first sentence of subsequent paragraphs, and first and last sentences of last paragraph, and then go right to the questions. Before, I used to read the WHOLE passage before I answered questions, but complete time waster and made me more stressed!</p>
<p>My advice: READ. Read the newspaper, read articles, read well-written novels, read essays... just READ. Then think about what you read after; ask yourself what the main point is, how each paragraph links up to the main point (if it's an article), etc. </p>
<p>The only vocab I memorized was the Kaplan's Top 100 SAT Words (google it!). I don't believe in memorizing vocab words because there are so many words out there that you can't possibly get to half of them... and you're likely to forget many of them. </p>
<p>Btw, my W and CR scores were well above 700.</p>
<p>Actually I don't believe in memorising vocab at all. No point, you either have the vocab to begin with, and if you don't it takes years of reading around to develop a full vocab, you can't cram. Far more effective is doing some questions and learnign the question style. Most of the time you don't need to understand all, or even most of it. You just enough to get a general idea of what's going on. I got an 800 in CR btw, and there were definitely 2,3 words in there I wasn't sure about. SAT is mostly technique, the reading and math level is like 8th grade, jus they make you use your knowledge in....more difficult ways.</p>
<p>I agree with everyone so far. A lot of doing well on the sat has to do with being savvy with the test. From your post, I can tell that you are in my SAT boat from a year ago - top-notch in math but dissatisfied with English. I took the very next SAT, and boosted my writing 120 points; here's what worked for me. Take the College Board's "Official Guide", the one with a ton of released SATs, and just take them. It's all about getting a good feel for the patterns. It kind of caters well to us math types. You can pick up tricks here and there, but nothing replaces solid practice. As far as the essay, I took as many REAL 12s as I could find and tried to find similarities between them. I noticed, for example, that a lot of them were written in a quasi-narrative form, just talking about an experience that made the writer have the opinion that they do. So I basically used that form. I answered the prompt by explaining how one day convinced me of a certain idea. And no, I didn't lay out three historical, personal, and literary examples. That, plus some good, lengthy practice in SAT grammar, took me from a 680wr to an 800wr. So plug away and note patterns. Best of luck!</p>