I'm playing a tournament this weekend in New Orleans so my Scrabble study is really kicking into high gear right now.
When I study Scrabble, the people I'm around give me the strangest looks, especially when I'm working with my flashcards. They get even more perplexed when they look at them and realize how much effort I had put into making them. I thought you might like to look at them, so I took some pictures of them.
As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger view.
These were my first flashcards. They are the most common 6-to-make-7 stems: TISANE, SATIRE, RETAIN, EASTER and just for fun, IRONED. I wrote the stem with the letter on one side of the card, and the answers were on the back. I used a black Sharpie. One puzzle per card. Each stem has a different color card. TISANE is on yellow; SATIRE on orange. I think the colors help me remember.
During the fall I would take them on my work breaks and study them in the park near my library. I even tried to study the same words in the same places, so that now when I think of certain words, I associate them with a particular place in the park.
This was my second set of cards. I found a list of all the four and five letter words that have either a J, Q, X, or Z in them. I crossed out all the words that I knew already. I wrote the alphagrams in pen on one side of the card and the answers on the back. Each card has four or five puzzles.
I think of all the studying I've done, this set of cards improved my game the best.
It's my biggest stack of cards. My hand cramped up horribly when I made these. So it was clear that I was going to need a little help. That's when I downloaded LeXpert.
With LeXpert I found a list of the 1000 most probable words. Out of these, I found those that have only one anagram. I call them singletons. I then had a list of 373. I printed out the lists and then cut them out in groups of ten and glued them onto the cards with a gluestick. But I found that the paper separated from the card so I had to go back over them with invisible tape. Later I numbered the cards so that I could study them in order. These were easy to format because there is only one answer per alphagram. Just recently I added the one letters hooks for them, which I should have done before I printed the list out.
These are the cards I have worked with the most lately. I'm pretty sure I've got them about 90%, which is my goal. I usually study them when I take a bubble bath. (Please don't try to make a mental image of that).
So in order to avoid the problems I had with the glue stick and the tape and whatnot, I had the brilliant idea of getting some mailing labels. The only problems was trying to get LeXpert to print on the labels correctly. It probably took over a half hour just to find the right formatting. But after that, it was a cinch. The main problem with these cards is that I lumped all the stems together into one list and arranged them by probability. So they are not very coherent.
I have yet to really work with these cards. But I did play SENORITA a while back.
I made some like this that had 6 to make 7 letter stems, but I accidentally washed them.
This is the future of my flashcard study: my Palm. I figured out the formatting so that I use the page down to flip between alphagrams and answers. The only problem is that I couldn't get LeXpert to generate this kind of list, so I had to type it all out manually. I got the lists from Metagram. I guess it is still better than writing it out by hand.
I've got 15 documents of 6 to make 7 letter stems: ALIENS, ENTERS, INSERT, LADIES, NAILER, RAINED, RETAIL, SERIAL, SIGNAL, SINGER, STERNA, STONER, TOESIN*, TRAINS, and TUNERS. The first page has the ananomic (ex. STONER=BINGER FEASTED ON MUCH POT), and the puzzles follow. Perhaps later I can post the documents for download.
The advantage is that its more discreet than my flashcards. I can do it in public and not get funny looks. I can also study with the lights off, so I can do them in bed at night without bothering my wife. The main disadvantage is that I can't study in my bubble bath for fear of dropping the Palm in the water.
Posted by Mike Waugh at March 31, 2005 05:18 PM | TrackBack