Three books that use this principle:

500 Key Words for the SAT, and How to Remember Them Forever! by Charles Gulotta

Vocabulary Cartoons: Building an Educated Vocabulary With Visual Mnemonics

by Sam Burchers, Max Burchers, Bryan Burchers

Picture These SAT Words! by Philip Geer

It’s always advisable to make flashcards. Make sure you write out the words and their definitions by hand, and say the word aloud as you write the definition. The act of writing it down sometimes does as much for memorization as the flashcards themselves.

The best way to improve your vocabulary long term, of course, is to READ! You’ve got a couple of months until the SAT—get a few higher-level novels, the type of thing you would read for school. Anything with more complex language, the classics; they’ll improve your grammar, reading comprehension, and vocabulary all at the same time. Look up any word you find that you don’t know, and make sure you understand it’s meaning in the context that you found it. (A good example: on the very first page of Crime and Punishment, I ran across the word “prevaricate” and had to look it up. It has a similar meaning to “equivocate” and is one of my new favorite words!) Think of it as LEARNING words, not just “memorizing” them!

There are different word-a-day email services online if you do a search, for a bit of extra vocabulary. Both www.webster.com and www.dictionary.com have one, and I think there are some out there specifically for the SAT. College Board has a Question of the Day, so even if you don’t want to study intensively every day, you can still spend a few minutes answering a question and thinking about the test—every few days there’s a vocabulary question. http://apps.collegeboard.com/qotd/question.do

Another GREAT way to learn vocabulary is to look at root words. The SAT seems to really like words with strong Latin roots, so the more of them you know (facere, mittere, venire, etc.), the better you’ll be able to figure out and remember words you don’t know. With a casual search, I found this site with Latin derivatives: http://www.geocities.com/gene_moutoux/latinderivatives.htm , and you can use Wikipedia to look at prefixes and suffixes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix . To give an example, I did a vocabulary tests as part this extensive career-aptitude test thing I took last summer. One of the words was “concomitant”, which I didn’t actually know. But I did know that there are a lot of Latin compound words with “mittere—to send” which give us English words with “mit” or “mis” in them (omit, commit, mission, ect.), and the prefix co- implies “together” or “with”, which gave me enough of an idea to eliminate the wrong answers and get the right one! (“Concomitant” means “accompanying” – like, something that accompanies/goes along with something else. The “word origins” on the first definition of “commit” here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/commit shows the com- + mittere; the origins of “concomitant” sort of show co- + committere, altered to “comitare”, but close enough. Looking at the Latin may not give you an exact definition, but it’ll get you close and help you eliminate wrong answers.)

In any case, it’s a great way to learn vocabulary—you get one root word and memorize its definition, and then you can easily learn a whole set of words that have similar meanings from that one root word.

Good luck!

If you want to learn a lot of words, then read Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses,” or “Midnight’s Children.” You’ll enjoy the books, remember the words in context, and have some interesting books to write about in the essay prompt.

Also, try incorporating new words into your speech.

Good Luck!