Howdy, folks!
This week I have an exercise for you that should get your neurons firing in a useful direction. And it's not something that requires all-encompassing attention, either - it's the sort of thing you might do in idle moments while driving (though please pay attention to the road!), or showering, or waiting in lines. You can do it at a leisurely pace; whatever suits you. Exercises like this train your brain to swim in the ocean of words even during times when you're not explicitly "studying." Remember - every little bit helps!
I'll present a simple version of the exercise here. First, pick a couple of consonants - making at least one of them a mid-point tile (BCFHKMPVWY) is a good start, and I'd avoid S or JQXZ at first. For example, let's choose D and P. Your task is this: without writing anything down or having tiles in front of you to shuffle, try to think of words that include D, P, and any two vowels. Two vowels, two consonants, four-letter words. If you feel unsure of some of your answers, either check them after you're done, if you can, or make a mental note to check them later with a program like Zyzzyva.
What you're doing here, starting with shorter, simpler words, is teaching yourself to turn around groups of letters in your mind. The complete list of fours with a D, a P and two vowels: APED, PADI, PAID, APOD, DOPA, DEEP, PEED, PIED, DOPE, OPED, DUPE, POOD, UPDO (and DOUP#, if you're Collins), PUDU. Notice that the D, the P, and the vowels can appear in many different sequences in the words. To find all of these, notice what you have to do - in your mind, you have to evaluate DP plus these vowel combos: AA, AE, AI, AO, AU, EE, EI, EO, EU, II, IO, IU, OO, OU, UU. But four letters isn't very many to juggle in your mind, so you can move quickly. And while you'll still have to examine each combination for at least a few seconds, your intuitive familiarity with English will help inform you that, for example, DP plus EE is much more likely to yield words than DP plus IU is. Through this exercise, that native intuition will be honed even further, and you'll solidify the studying you've already done. (Also, the ability to anagram without tiles or writing allows you to study much faster, covering more words and getting more practice on the troublesome ones.)
You may be wondering why I stipulated above that you should do this exercise entirely in your head - that is, no writing things down or having tiles in front of you. There are two reasons: first, doing the exercise in your head frees you to practice your skills even in situations where you don't have tiles or writing materials at hand. But second and more important, anagramming in your head is an important Scrabble skill. As I said in a recent post, the less time you have to expend on finding words, the more time you have left over to consider the strategic implications of your plays, and because the strategic elements of the game often require deeper, more multidimensional thought, it's better to be able to devote your clock time to that purpose than to finding words and plays. And being able to shift around letters in your head feeds into your skill at visualizing plays on the board, too - finding the best play can require seeing complex overlaps or finding plays through disconnected letters on the board. These are the kinds of plays that experts often see without even thinking very hard, because the process of mentally turning around letters has become so ingrained. If you want to excel at Scrabble, you should look to make these skills second nature for yourself.
By doing this exercise with various letter combinations, you're building your feel for the structures of the words, and systematizing that ability means that you can call on it during games to help you. Even better, the act of cycling mentally through letters and combinations of letters can help you in other ways: for example, when you have a blank on your rack, you want to be able to go confidently and quickly through the alphabet, imagining the blank as every different letter of the alphabet and being able to find what the blank allows you to play. Rehearsing the act of mental cycling makes that process feel natural, over time, and this skill will serve you well whether you're considering bingos with a blank (a good spot to be in!) or just finding the best shorter word you can play in an important or high-scoring spot on the board. You want to get your Scrabble brain into that cycling habit, and little informal exercises like this help cultivate that habit.
If you're advanced enough in your word practice that two consonants and two vowels is feeling easy, there are any number of ways to make this exercise tougher. Add a third consonant, or require a third vowel, and try to find five-letter words, or if you're feeling particularly masochistic, add a blank tile that could be either consonant or vowel to your puzzle. Or require the consonants to be in a certain order, or...well, any other rule you want to impose. There's a variant I like to play during my long commute to work sometimes: most license plates in my part of the world have consonant-heavy letter strings. I'll take a string from a neighboring car I see and try to think of all the words with those letters plus any number of vowels, or if it's a particularly clunky set of consonants like GJW, I'll allow a blank or extra consonants into the solution. (There are ten 6-8 letter words containing GJW - can you think of some of them?) Customize the game however you like - the point is to create the habit of rearranging letters in your mind.
Happy Scrabbling,
Geoff
No comments:
Post a Comment