Well, school’s out for the summer (Dalat and Uplands) and so is the SAT. Folks can still attend summer programs if they so choose but for the SAT, the next sitting is not until a few more months down the road (11 October 2014). That means no SAT test is offered over the entire extended break. In that light, the SAT tutor in me sees it opportune to advocate some serious SAT Prep over the stretch – the kind that SAT students always ‘wished’ they had the bandwidth for but somehow could never afford…… And I can already hear Vocabulary Development crying out to be taken.
For me, vocabulary rules in SAT and Vocabulary Development should be at the forefront of any decent SAT Prep. It comprises 3 phases: scouting new words, researching and learning their (various) meanings and memorizing them.
Vocabulary Development basically means mastering new words and there’s no better way to accomplish that than through good old-fashioned reading. This is best done nowadays on the Internet because technology will facilitate the practice very nicely for you. The reading material is also virtually limitless – more than any physical library or repository can ever hold and whether it is books, articles, news, magazines and so forth, everything is readily available there.
Vocabulary wise, reading online is friendly also because you could have an online dictionary tab constantly on standby whenever you’re at it. And unlike their paperback counterparts which are constrained by size, weight or whatever, online dictionaries typically come with really awesome features. One example of that which will enable you to own those SAT’s vocabulary-in-context favourites are the pin-point example sentences.
Easy learning is nice but on the flip side, it could be lame – easy-come, easy-go. Memory penetration tends to be poor when information is obtained facilely and retention suffers as a result. There’s a memorization technique that rocks for me though: try rounding off each new word learnt with closed-eye visualization, fleetingly but sharply, the transfer of the new information within your brains from short to long term memory. Sounds ‘noob’? But it works!
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