To anyone who is against memorizing vocab

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<p><em>claps</em> Well Said.</p>

<p>I don't think memorizing roots will help at all because 1. There are so many different meanings to just one root and 2. It gets so confusing.</p>

<p>I'm going to look up as much high frequency word lists as possible. Maybe that will help me with my SATs in October.</p>

<p>Lemme help you: <a href="http://img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf&lt;/a>
^ is accurate when it comes to vocab you should know for the SAT. I checked random words on the past tests and they were in this list.</p>

<p>Just don't use Princeton Reviews WordSmart. It helps in communicative vocab, but is not for the SAT even though it claims to have used a computer to make the "SAT Hit Parade". I check out 4 words in a row from the real SAT and they were no where to be found in PR's book.</p>

<p>And to quote post #20, it is better to know something via memorization than to know nothing. The problem with reading is that most people, like me, just skip over a word that is unfamiliar and the sentence still remains more or less intact. Reading would be an exhaustive process if you looked up every word you do not know.</p>

<p>If you read the New York Times and adult fiction and nonfiction, and look up words you don't know, you will be well prepared for the tests.</p>

<p>these lists work well with past SATs because they're edited to reflect the words that have been on SATs in the past. but you don't need to do well on a past SAT--you need to do well on a future SAT. a list that predicts the past doesn't help very much.</p>

<p>of course if people want to memorize vocabulary, that's their right; this is a free country. but the test is designed to reward the back-up strategy i described earlier; after you practice it for a little bit you can pick out the words that might seem to have false affixes, like "atrocious" (though i should point out that all you usually need to work out is whether a word is positive or negative, not what it means, so thinking that "atrocious" meant "dark" would actually get you through a real SAT sc question with no problems, which is exactly the point).</p>

<p>i think the difference here is that the pro-memorization camp seems to think it's necessary to know what the words on the test mean to know which answer is correct. i don't think it's necessary at all, and my approach is about figuring out the correct answers, not the meanings of the words.</p>

<p>I think it is necessary to know enough words to do process of elimination and get the right answer. I have studied prefixes and suffixes for a long time, and I know that the SAT doesn't use so obvious words for the harder level questions. Back-dooring words only get the easy ones---they are "easy" because the can get backdoored, not the other way around.</p>

<p>iin77: That's definitely a special case...</p>

<p>xitammarg:</p>

<p>Let's keep the following in mind:</p>

<p>1 - All your results are inflated since you are in higher education and COULD be misleading, despite the fact that your 800s were done using YOUR strategy</p>

<p>2 - Your different 800s in verbal don't indicate that SCs aren't about vocabulary.
Consider:
a) You could have known both sets of words
b) Your talent (see 1) puts you beyond 800 to an extent where you'll get 800 since you are so close to (or hit) 100% uncurved. Considering this, if someone were to make the curve on the CR section extremely tight, you wouldn't get 800s every time. Rather it would vary between 750 and 800.</p>

<p>3 - Using your approach, you'll end up memorizing hundreds of prefixes and suffixes. Won't that take long as well?</p>

<p>xitammarg:</p>

<p>How many of prefixes and suffixes would you need to de-construct every word possible for the SAT?</p>

<p>I never memorized vocab, I knew the words just from reading.
really, the bet way is just eliminating the wrong answers. you should at least know some of the words in most of the questions.
I had a 740 CR.</p>

<p>hi amu,</p>

<p>i applaud your skepticism. if you feel like memorizing vocabulary, i won't try to stop you; i only brought this up because you asked.</p>

<p>i don't recommend memorizing affixes either. in fact, when it comes to vocabulary, i don't recommend memorizing <em>anything</em>. think about the vocabulary you know by heart--words like "chair," "piano," "yesterday," and so on. these are words you never use incorrectly, and you never sat down and memorized them. you just know them. the same is true for prefixes like "un-" and suffixes like "-ous." and the same is also true for words and affixes that you might not even be aware you're aware of--passive vocabulary is almost always exponentially larger than active vocabulary. we had the example of "atrocious" in an earlier post; if you knew how to recognize roots and suffixes, you might realize that "-ous" means you're working with an adjective, and "atroc-" is the rest of the word; from there, you might recall the word "atrocity," which has been in the news a lot lately. you might recall that "atrocity" has a negative connotation. for an sc question, that would usually be enough. (of course, you might not remember the word "atrocity," or you might use some other approach on the word "atrocious," like recognizing the french cognate "atroce" or the spanish cognate "atroz." or you might not come up with any of those. luckily there would be at least 4 other words in the question to draw inferences from, as well as the majority of the words in the prompt sentence.) by identifying roots, affixes, and cognates; drawing inferences from the web of contexts in the question; knowing the structure of a real SAT sc question; and practicing, you'd find yourself able to select correct answer choices even in situation where you don't know what many of the words actually mean. and you don't memorize anything to practice that; you just practice it.</p>

<p>i never memorized any affixes or roots, and i don't recommend that people i help memorize any, either. memorization is not a good way to learn advanced vocabulary. if you want to memorize words, go for it. but i've seen many, many people score very high on the verbal section without memorizing anything. it takes a little practice, to be sure, but it takes much less practice (in my experience) than memorization. but like i said--it's up to you.</p>

<p>I took spanish 4 AP and didn't recognize the cognate "atroz". Kids try to do that whole "language of origin" stuff on spelling bees and fail in the upper elimination rounds.</p>

<p>I'm also in the read everything you can get your hands on camp... doing well on the SAT verbal does not require memorization, it requires the ability to use context in order to make deliberate and intelligent choices. This is the ability that is naturally exercised whenever we read. I never sat down to look up words that I didn't know as I was reading. It takes too long. I nevertheless absorbed the meaning of new words by seeing them used in context. Memorizing definitions aren't enough, because you often don't see how a word "fits" in an actual sentence. </p>

<p>That being said, if you only have three months left and are not a voracious reader, by all means do some memorization. But here's a suggestion, instead of memorizing individual definitions for all the words that just might show up, memorize categories of words that have about the same meaning. For example, instead of memorizing:</p>

<p>voracious : wanting or devouring great quantities of food
insatiable : impossible to satisfy
ravenous : extremely hungry</p>

<p>Memorize:</p>

<p>Never full : voracious, insatiable, ravenous, the list goes on...</p>

<p>It's easier, more efficient, and sufficient for what you need on the SAT.</p>

<p>after making that post, i thought it might make a little more sense to show you what i'm talking about a little more concretely, using the question you originally posted:</p>

<p>Actors in melodramas often emphasized tense moments by being ______, for example, raising their voices and pretending to swoon.</p>

<p>A - imperious
B - inscrutable
C - convivial
D - Histrionic
E - Solicitious</p>

<p>we know from the structure of the prompt that the word in the blank will mean something very close "raising their voices and pretending to swoon," and that it has something to do with "tense moments." since "tense" is pretty much a negative word, we can expect that the word in the blank will also have a negative connotation. so we're looking for a negative word that has something to do with loud voices, swooning, acting, and melodrama.</p>

<p>(a) seems to have the suffixes (suffices?) "-ious" and "-ness," with the rest of the word being "imper-" (possible with a prefix "im-," possibly not). what goes with the root "imper"? we can think of similar words like "imperial," "empire," or "imperative." if you know latin, maybe you know the word "imperator," which (i think?) is what caesar called himself (haven't taken latin in 15 years, so forgive me if i'm wrong). none of those things seems to have anything to do with acting, tenseness, or swooning, so this probably isn't a good choice.</p>

<p>(b) here we recognize a suffix "-able" and the rest of the word "inscrut," possibly with a prefix "in-", which might leave the root "scrut." we might think of the word "scrutiny," as in the phrase "public scrutiny," or we might think of "scrupulous"--is that similar? who knows? let's look at the affixes, too--if "-able" is a suffix that means you can do something to something else, and "in-" often means "the opposite of x," then "inscrutable" could mean "unable to be scruted," whatever "scruted" means. does it seem likely that actors would become "unable to be scruted" when they wanted to "emphasize tense moments?" who would be scruting them, or not scruting them? it seems unlikely that this is the right choice.</p>

<p>(c) an earlier poster already mentioned what seems like a prefix "con-," which usually means "with" or "together" (we know this from spanish, maybe, or just from knowing english words like "condensation," "converge," "congregation," and so on). there's also probably a root "viv," which we could recognize from french or spanish as meaning "live." so there's a good chance that this word has something, on some level, to do with the ideas of life and togetherness, neither one of which has anything to do with swooning, actors, melodrama, tensensess, or anything else in the question.</p>

<p>(d) this seems to have the compound suffix "-ionic" on it, with a root "hist-" or "histr-." an earlier poster already mentioned that this might lead you to think of "hysterics." if you know french or spanish, you might recognize the cognates "histoire" and "historia," respectively, both of which mean "story," which at least has something to do with the idea of acting, melodrama, and so on (more than anything else has so far, anyway).</p>

<p>(e) we can probably recognize a root "solicit" and an suffix "-ous." you've probably seen signs in offices that say "no soliciting," which suggests that soliciting is unwanted behavior, which seems to go along with the negative connotation of the word in the blank. but does it make sense that soliciting would involve swooning and yelling? why would someone want to go into an office and swoon and yell?</p>

<p>that leaves us with (a), (b), and (c) as very weak candidates. (d) seems like it could be related to storytelling and, if we managed to think of "hysterics" as a cognate, also seems like it could have a negative connotation and be associated with extreme behavior. (e) seems to have a negative connotation, but doesn't seem related to the idea of swooning, tenseness, or drama. if we're familiar with the SAT's design and reasonably sure of the cognates and things we identified, (d) has to be the right answer, even if we don't actually know what (d) means.</p>

<p>compare this approach with learning the 1000 sparknotes words available here:</p>

<p><a href="http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:-UevkljIi1AJ:img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf+sat+word+list+sparknotes&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:-UevkljIi1AJ:img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf+sat+word+list+sparknotes&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>that list doesn't have the words "inscrutable" or "histrionics" in it.</p>

<p>so if you memorized the sparknotes list, when you come to this question you'll still have to come up with some alternative strategy or skip the question.</p>

<p>you might protest that you wouldn't be able to think of all the cognates or identify the roots that i identified. that may be. this is why you have to practice. but practicing the technique above will take less time than memorizing 1000 words, and will pay dividends on every single real SAT question, which memorization will not do.</p>

<p>how would you recommend how to practice</p>

<p>good question. it basically comes down to knowing the structure of SAT sc questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>there will often be a phrase, often set off by punctuation, that defines the word you should look for in the blank. in the example above the phrase is "for example, raising their voices and pretending to swoon," and the phrase is preceded by a comma.</p></li>
<li><p>in many cases, whether the word has a positive or negative connotation is just as important as what it actually means. this isn't true in real life--it's only true on the SAT and other standardized tests. in the example above, we can tell from context clues like "tense" and "raising their voices" that the word in the blank probably has a negative connotation, but this example isn't as good as SAT questions often are. in two-blank questions, particularly, it's helpful to figure out whether the blanks are positive-positive, positive-negative, negative-positive, or negative-negative. this can usually be accomplished by looking for context clues. then, when you go through the answer choices, instead of only trying to figure out what words mean, try to figure out whether they're positive or negative.</p></li>
<li><p>practice identifying roots and thinking of any other words you can that <em>sound</em> similar to those roots--notice i said <em>sound,</em> not <em>look.</em> language is primarily an oral/aural phenomenon, not a written one. relying on sound is what lets us realize that "histr-" might be similar to "hyster-." identifying roots and similar-sounding words usually won't tell you what your original word actually means, but it will usually give you enough of a sense of the word to generate possible meanings and have a rough idea of the word's connotation. also take into account prefixes and suffixes, but not to the same extent: sometimes "im-" means "the opposite of," and sometimes it means "in-."</p></li>
<li><p>practice using the above ideas and see what comes to you. you'll know you're getting better at it when you become certain answer choices are correct even when you don't know exactly what they mean. be flexible with this. it's kind of a holistic thing.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>i know that sounds kind of fuzzy, but in a lot of ways it's a fuzzy process when you're just starting. play with it and see what happens.</p>

<p>--mike</p>

<p>I have recently come up with a strategy of learning new words for SAT: I found the site majortests.com and there are 10 lists of words you should know (they say so) for SAT. What I liked there is that they have some space for notes and that's where my strategy comes in: looking for a sentence that contains that word (on the Internet, in a book or in a dictionary) and writing there that sentence. I don't try to memorize mechanically, it just doesn't work for me, but I do try to read that list, especially the phrases, as often as I can and finally I hope I'll be able to associate the word with the phrase. When I see the word in the SAT test, the corresponding phrase comes into my mind and I can just deduce the meaning. It's a lot easier than memorizing definitions. Try it for a week or two. Maybe that works for you, too.</p>

<p>xitammarg:</p>

<p>Firstly, I want you to know my point is not to be skeptical or to argue but rather to gain insight into the issue by having a peaceful discourse</p>

<p>The below questions are not inter-related:</p>

<p>1 - You still haven't commented on my point that YOUR results are inflated due to your level of education</p>

<p>2 - You stated:</p>

<p>
[quote]
we had the example of "atrocious" in an earlier post; if you knew how to recognize roots and suffixes, you might realize that "-ous" means you're working with an adjective, and "atroc-" is the rest of the word; from there, you might recall the word "atrocity," which has been in the news a lot lately. you might recall that "atrocity" has a negative connotation. for an sc question, that would usually be enough. (of course, you might not remember the word "atrocity," or you might use some other approach on the word "atrocious," like recognizing the french cognate "atroce" or the spanish cognate "atroz." or you might not come up with any of those.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The process described above would take long on the actual SAT, much longer than if you knew your vocab & affixes.</p>

<p>3 - Post #34 seems to imply that you DO advocate memorizing prefixes and suffixes but not vocabulary, correct? How would you go about doing this? Do you have a list?</p>

<p>4 - I'm impressed with how you narrowed down the choices, especially how you eliminated (e). If someone is seriously looking into your approach, how long will it take to understand it thoroughly?</p>

<p>5 - Just out of curiousity: After doing his research and agreeing with you about no-vocab memorization, did Xiggi like your exact approach?</p>

<p>
[quote]

The process described above would take long on the actual SAT, much longer than if you knew your vocab & affixes.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Based on my experience so far, practicing xitammarg's method to the fullest extent on "CB practice tests" can get you better at using the process more efficiently at a faster pace.</p>

<p>Hi Amu,</p>

<p>sorry if i seemed combative; i didn't mean to suggest that i was bothered by what you said. i just also don't want to seem like i'm trying to force my position down anybody's throat. memorizing word lists for the SAT is a strategy that has been used for as long as i've been around, and it will probably continue as long as there's still an SAT. i'm not trying to get people to stop if they'd rather keep memorizing. i was only trying to show that there is a method to the no-memorization madness. i hope i haven't offended anybody.</p>

<p>to answer your questions:</p>

<ol>
<li> sorry for omitting this. while i did take the new SAT while still in law school (because that's when it came out), i don't think that being in law school helps you on the SAT. law school teaches you words like "liminy" and "seisin," which don't show up on the SAT (this goes to back up my point about the kinds of words that <em>do</em> show up on the SAT). and law school definitely isn't a place where clear, rational thinking is rewarded, so i don't think that was a factor, either (i could go into more detail on that but i don't want to change the subject).</li>
</ol>

<p>furthermore, i scored multiple 800's on the verbal section of the previous form of the SAT while still in high school in the mid-90's. i never memorized vocabulary in order to do that, and i encountered unknown words every time i took the test (for what it's worth, i also never used a guessing strategy). the test was even more "vocabulary"-oriented back then, since there were analogies on it in addition to sentence-completion questions, and fewer rc questions.</p>

<p>more than that, i've helped a fair number of people do well on both the previous version of the SAT and the current version (not to mention on the current version of the GRE CAT, which has antonym questions in addition to analogies and sc questions and which <em>requires</em> you to answer every single question before you can see the next one), and i've <em>always</em> advised people not to memorize vocabulary. the results have been positive.</p>

<ol>
<li> i agree with mario's post above--you'll get better at doing it faster as you work with the process. it's like anything else. on top of that, it takes much longer to write out an explanation of a mental process than it does to complete the process in your head. i liken it to playing a sport: if you made a goaltender list all the things he takes into consideration while he's making a save, it would probably take over a minute to go through all the angles and vectors he considers and the past experiences that inform his positioning, but he makes his decision in an instant. similarly, when i see the word "inscrutable," i immediately notice a probably root "scrut" and recall the words "scrutiny" and "scrutinize;" i also wonder if "screw" and "scrupulous" might have anything to do with it. this is because i do these kinds of questions a lot. if you practice, you'll get faster too.</li>
</ol>

<p>i should also add that our entire discussion of the word "atrocious" so far has been mis-guided. i apologize for not raising this point sooner. answering an SAT sc question would never <em>require</em> you to know what "atrocious" meant, although you might be able to answer a question by knowing what it means. in other words, knowing the meaning of the word "atrocious" could be sufficient to answer an SAT question, but it could never be necessary. (if the necessary/sufficient thing sounds like law school talk, i have to disappoint again--it really comes from TOK back in high school :) most law students wouldn't know the difference between necessity and sufficiency if it offered them a clerkship.) this is because, as i mentioned before, there will never be an SAT question that says "Define the word 'atrocious'" and then offers you three lines of space for writing out the meaning. There will only be questions that give you a sentence full of context constructed according to the rules and patterns of the SAT and five answer choices also chosen according to those rules and patterns. so it isn't that you'd try to determine exactly what atrocious means, necessarily; you'd use the web of context from the entire question to figure out which answer choice goes along with the ideas in the sentence.</p>

<ol>
<li> i don't recommend memorizing affixes or roots. if you speak english you already know them on some level. in the word "memorizing," for example, "-ize" is clearly the same suffix as the "-ize" in "bastardize" or "prioritize" and so on, and the "-ing" is the same "-ing" you see in any present participle or gerund. once you chop off the suffixes you can see the end of the root by default: "memorizing" - "-ing" - "-ize" = "memor-", just like "inscrutable" - "-able" = "inscrut-". then you look at the beginning of that string to see if there might be a prefix, knowing that prefixes are hard to read than suffixes: is the "in-" in "inscrutable" a negativizing prefix like the "im-" in "impossible," or is it a locating prefix like the "in-" in "internal"? things like this have to be gutted out from the context of the sentence and the other answer choices.</li>
</ol>

<p>(there's not a list of prefixes to memorize or a recognized way of breaking prefixes down into classes like negativizing, locating, intensifying, either. i just made that up to reflect the way those prefixes seem to work for me.)</p>

<ol>
<li><p>this is a good question, and a concrete answer is hard to give. you'll pick it up faster if you're used to working in ambiguity and figuring things out without knowing all the pieces for sure. if you're not used to that, i imagine it takes longer. this is why i think the best outside practice for verbal sections of tests is a good crossword puzzle--not for the words you learn, but because you learn to think about groups of words as systems with pieces that are all mutually interdependent (that's probably redundant, but i don't care :) ).</p></li>
<li><p>i can't speak for xiggi, but i think that the method i've outlined is basically in line with what he recommends.</p></li>
</ol>