<p>Is there a good book for learning common idiomatic expressions? Thanks =)</p>
<p>for writing a high scoring essay, just put a very arbitrary anecdote. that's what i did and i got a 10/12</p>
<p>coolness, can I assume you're trying to avoid missing any of the idioms in the multiple choice writing questions? sites like <a href="http://www.idiomconnection.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.idiomconnection.com/</a> have good lists. unfortunately, memorizing all of these in order to get a few more writing questions correct is kind of like studying the vocab books to help with sentence completions. it's not a very efficient use of limited study time, and you can still get a word or idiom that you don't know. fortunately there are not very many idiom questions on the writing; maybe 2 or 3 typically.</p>
<p>what I hate the most are the questions where you can narrow it down to either an idiom or no error/no change. at that point, you either know it or you don't. I've had good luck by NOT trusting my ear if I'm on a hard problem at the end of the section. CB seems to like to use idioms that are fairly obscure.</p>
<p>another trick: before you ever go with no error/no changes, especially on a hard problem, quickly ask yourself whether any of the other choices are colloquialisms and are idiomatically correct. idioms are often two or three word phrases that start with a preposition. </p>
<p>hope this helps.</p>
<p>i got an 11/12...just try to use lots of examples (use a variety) to support your thesis/main idea...i used three and developed them as well as i could in that time frame</p>
<p>Idioms are pretty tricky. One book that has a good idiom list that is not endlessly lengthy is PR's Grammar Smart.</p>