I’m not saying you can’t force yourself to remember a list of definitions and then recall those definitions when presented with the appropriate words. I’m not even saying that you can’t do that with 5,000 words if you feel like it, or more. You totally can. People do it all the time.
I’m just saying that these feats of memorization aren’t really the same thing as actually knowing how to use the words you’re studying.
I’ve seen this kind of artificial memorization cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. Perhaps the most extreme example was a student who wrote in an essay that something happened “for the inaugural interval in 20 years,” instead of writing “for the first time in 20 years,” because he had memorized that “inaugural” meant “first,” and that “interval” meant “time.” More subtly, and more problematically, I’ve seen students answer Sentence Completion questions incorrectly because they had memorized an incorrect, misleading, or inadequate “definition” of a particular term.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m fully in favor of having the largest vocabulary possible when it comes to real life. But the value of forced memorization is negligible at best when it comes to building a powerful vocabulary. And a powerful vocabulary isn’t as important on the SAT as most people think, anyway.
(By the way—not that you asked, but the way to develop an advanced vocabulary is to become genuinely interested in advanced stuff (politics, art, philosophy, history, whatever), so that you read about it and seek out other people who are also interested in it. If you do this for any period of time you’ll quickly learn all sorts of new words and phrases, and you won’t even notice it.) (Not that it’ll probably help on the SAT, though.)
Okay . . . So Now What?
After our thorough discussion of some of the major reasons why memorizing vocabulary isn’t the best way to go for most test-takers, you may be wondering how to approach Sentence Completion questions.
The answer is that you approach SAT Sentence Completion questions in much the same way that you would approach Passage-Based Reading questions: the correct answer to a Sentence Completion question will restate a concept from the sentence, just as the correct answer to a Passage-Based Reading question will restate a concept from the text.
So, if you happen to know what all the words in a particular Sentence Completion question mean, answering that question correctly is just a matter of reading carefully and paying attention to details.
But what if you don’t know what all the words mean?
Every single test-taker is going to run into at least one question on test day that involves a word he doesn’t know. Most of us will run into a handful of them. Some will run into even more. For these situations, we have backup strategies that can often (but not always) help us figure out how to answer the questions.
We’ll talk about those back-up strategies in just a moment, but, before we do, I want to lay out the proper way to prioritize all this stuff, from a preparation standpoint.
Now that we know that the entire Critical Reading section on the SAT basically rewards us for choosing answers that restate things directly from the page in front of us, we should focus on making sure that we never miss a question in which we know the meanings of every relevant word. This is basically just a matter of reading carefully, remembering how the test works, and paying attention to details.
So the first order of business, and the most important concern from here on out, is this: make sure you grab every possible point from the questions where you know all the relevant words!
After you get to a point where you can correctly answer any SAT Critical Reading question you come across when vocabulary isn’t a problem, your next priority should be to focus on improving Math and Writing as much as possible.
Finally, after you feel you’ve made all the progress you can make on the Math and Writing stuff, and after you’ve reached a point where you basically never miss a Critical Reading question when you know all the relevant words, then, and only then, would I say it’s a good idea to devote serious consideration to the Sentence Completion questions with difficult words.
So let me reiterate that, because this is important and most people get it very, very wrong. My list of priorities would be the following:
oBasically perfecting Passage-Based Reading and Sentence Completion questions in which vocabulary is not a significant issue.
oJust about anything SAT-related that doesn’t involve worrying about vocabulary (in other words, Math, Writing, et cetera).
oWorrying about questions that involve difficult vocabulary words placed in positions that cannot be ignored or worked around.