<p>As far as vocab novels, some people love them, some people don't. Try one and see!</p>
<p>Educational research suggests, however, that you have to see a word somewhere between 6 and 14 times in context in order to learn it. (I assume the exact number depends on things like whether you know all the other words in the surrounding text, whether there are a lot of syntax cues, etc.) So you should know that, while the books will likely help you, you can't expect to remember all the words in those books just because you've seen them once or twice.</p>
<p>I would pick a vocabulary edition of a classic novel (I think Kaplan has produced some of those?) instead of a pop-fiction book written just for SAT preparation. If you're reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, you'll be building your reading and vocabulary at the same time, especially if it has all the hard words printed at the bottom of the page.</p>
<p>Books are great! I have read Frankenstein and Jane Eyre over the past two weeks and am now reading Wuthering Heights and I see lots of SAT words.</p>
<p>yeah i need to do this too
on the last SAT i got like 10/19 sentence completion wrong, and like 5/35ish? on the reading, bringing my CR to an amazing 570 =/ ...</p>
<p>All I did was memorize latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes (which were all pretty intuitive, but I guess a review doesn't hurt) and write down and define any words I heard that I didn't know.</p>
<p>But the vocab on the SAT you can generally just guess at... for example, on the March SAT, one of the answers was celerity. I didn't know what celerity meant, but I knew ac*celer*ation has to do with speed, so I just guessed it meant "fast" or "speed" or something like that. I was right and I got the question right. Another example is harbinger on the March SAT. It just sounds like something bad, so I assumed it was, and was correct again.</p>
<p>Yeah... I got a perfect CR guessing on vocabulary. Supposedly, the March vocab was hard, too...</p>
<p>Wow... I think the fact that "harbinger" sounds bad is a misinterpretation (sp?). I think your getting at the fact that you have seen in it context in a negative tone. In fact, a string of sounds cannot "sound bad" unless it is connected to something bad (just think about it, is "puliphal" and negative or positive word (or neither)? There is no way of knowing unless you know the deffinition). Now I will say that I have learned, through vocab study, what both celerity and harbinger mean, and would be able to get those in a second, without any bit of guessing. In that sense, studying words is better.</p>
<p>I have probably posted this link on a dozen or so messages so far, but it truly saved my life. Doing a few of the word games a day can be very beneficial.</p>