CR and Writing Score

Test Preparation
1

<p>So, I heard that Word Smart by Princeton Review has the ~800 words most commonly tested and is very helpful. I know that almost half or more of the words on any lists given are pretty much the same and all. I was wondering if studying this would improve my reading score. I really need to improve my CR reading score before jan sat. I have brought writing up to ~770 without too much struggle because it’s just commonly tested grammar rules you have to study. I seem to not get much higher than 660 range in CR. Will memorizing these 800 words be enough to pull up my score to a 750 range. I don’t miss too many of the passage ones but i miss almost half of all the sentence completions. </p>

<p>any other tips/hints/suggestions would be greatly appreciated to prep for CR in particular but writing tips are welcome too!
Thanks a lot!</p>

2

<p>tips:</p>

<p>vocab is the easy part, don’t kill yourself over it</p>

<p>focus on passage based reading instead…</p>

<p>some tricks I used to help myself:</p>

<p>kind of skim through the questions before each section: then mark the lines that the questions indicate and scribble something to help you remember what that area will be testing you on.</p>

<p>for example if the question was: “what is the tone in 19-30” dont read the whole question, just see the lines, mark them, then see that it says tone and right tone, or “t” or anything to help you remember that the question on those lines will be about tone.</p>

<p>Mark ALL the questions, circle the WORDS that are tested (ie: “what does “farts” mean in line 40”) then just make mental note about the definition.</p>

<p>when you finally read through the passage after marking it up based on the questions, mark it up some more. When you get close to indicated lines, underline things that pertain to the question. For example, tone? underline words like fat, stupid, ugly, stupid, yuck-> tone is disgusted (or something like that). Purpose? well underline things that help you understand the text structure, ie: first this then that, finally this-> purpose is to summarize (or something…)</p>

<p>then when you go through the questions you should be able to just zip through.
For the later questions that usually ask about the passage overall, for single passages, just try to make mental notes about what the passage is trying to tell you.
for double passages, its crucial that you jot down a little note describing what the passage is trying to tell you for each passage. </p>

<p>blah blah blah sorry for a poorly made guide, but it works for me (800 CR)</p>

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<p>Thank you so much dougiezmd. I’m killing myself over the sentence completions. I’m fairly decent at the passages (1-3 wrong) and those are usually ones dealing with vocab i didn’t know. I miss nearly half of the vocab. I really want to get this to a 800. Spending my wonderful break studying for this test… agh.
I will definitely start marking up passages, I have never tried that yet. I will start with that on my next practice. Thanks a lot!</p>

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<p>The Direct Hits Core and Toughest Vocabulary books helped me to improve my Reading and Writing score. But start early with these books and don’t wait until the end to start your SAT preparation.</p>