You can stop drilling flashcards until your eyes bleed. This book teaches you the simple, intuitive strategy of using context clues to answer SAT vocabulary questions without memorizing a single definition. Learn to trust your logic, spot the hidden traps, and walk into the test with total confidence.

I remember sitting on my bedroom floor surrounded by hundreds of index cards. They were everywhere. I had piles for words I knew and even bigger piles for words I kept forgetting. My hand was cramping from writing definitions over and over again. It felt like I was trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. I would look at a word like obdurate and flip the card and see stubborn. Then five minutes later I would see obdurate again and my mind would go completely blank. The stress was eating me alive.

I had this heavy feeling in my chest every time I thought about the test. Everyone told me that the only way to get a good score was to learn these words. My teacher handed us a list of three thousand common SAT words and wished us luck. I looked at that list and wanted to cry. I was seventeen years old and I had other things to do. I had homework and sports and friends and I was supposed to spend every waking moment memorizing a dictionary. It felt impossible. I spent weeks doing this. I would take the cards on the bus. I would […]