Motivation and Content
There are many skills that are required to be a good SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game player. Some of the skills required are obvious while others are less apparent to the uninitiated. Among the less appreciated skills, stamina, gamesmanship, strategy and enumeration are required. Stamina is needed because games can last for hours—although tournament games are timed and almost always completed in less than an hour. Gamesmanship is required because one’s postures and gestures often can lead (or mislead) an opponent to conclusions about the quality of one’s rack. Strategy in SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game must be employed in a variety of ways, including knowing how to use the board to one’s advantage, how to leave tiles on one’s rack that are favorable for “bingo” plays, and how to weigh properly the score differential (the difference between the two scores) and the potential for future success, to name just a few. Enumeration, a fancy word for “counting,” is essential if you are to play quickly and prevent your opponent from claiming “extra” points. Good players, those that can be found frantically shuffling tiles and yelling “bingo” repeatedly, must also have be able to anagram and recognize “acceptable” words. As anyone who has ever opened up The Official SCRABBLE Ò Players Dictionary can attest to, the lexicon used in competitive SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game consists of many unfamiliar and remarkable words. In order to succeed in SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game you must become familiar and comfortable with these words—be they two-letter ones like “oe” or “mm” or eight-letter ones like “eulogiae” or “retiarii.”
While many other books on SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game have focused a great deal of attention on what I refer to as “strategy,” few have been dedicated to anagramming and word recognition. This book attempts to fill this important void in the literature. It does so through the construction of 110 quizzes that readers can take at their own pace. The quizzes each deal with different types of words—different on the basis of length, likelihood of play, and composition (i.e., number of vowels, consonants, or “power” tiles). The content of each quiz (and section) was chosen with care in order to best facilitate the accumulation of a broad array of words that will be helpful to people attempting to improve their game. Given that readers may want to take these quizzes periodically as their ability progresses, progress forms are provided at the end to enable Word Nerd Workbook aficionados to track their improvement over time.
NOTE: This is not an official book of the Hasbro Corporation or the National SCRABBLE Association. Its contents represent the labor of the author and any errors are entirely due to his humanness. Note: SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game is a registered trademark of Habro, Inc.
Charity
Eighty percent of all monies collected through the selling of this book will be donated to organizations that focus on improving literacy within North America. The author firmly believes that literacy is one of the preconditions for a functional, equitable, sustainable democracy.
Author
The author is a 30-something academic with too many interests to name. He has played SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game competitively for the past ten years and has logged nearly ten-thousand games on the Internet over this span. He participated in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. National SCRABBLE Ò Championships where he was once fortunate enough to play the highest scoring word of the entire first day (VANISHED for 194 points). Though, he isn’t one of the elite players and hasn’t won major tournaments, he recently moved up into the top 250 rated players in the National Scrabble Association—an accomplishment that he finds very humbling, especially since he has had to work diligently to learn new words and improve on word finding (i.e., anagramming) abilities. The author thoroughly enjoys the game and hopes that this book will enable others to sharpen their skills and perhaps produce a few logophiles (i.e., word lovers) along the way.
When not playing SCRABBLE ® Brand Crossword Game , the author chairs the Environmental Studies Program at Knox College, a liberal arts school located in the heartland of America. He is passionate about protecting our planet from unnecessary takings and leavings (i.e., waste). He hopes to promote environmental understanding through his teachings and writings.
Acknowledgment
This book would not have been possible without the use of LEXPERT, an anagram program developed by the Ravichandran’s of Michigan. I must also thank all the wonderful people in the Scrabble community that have made
playing the game so enjoyable and rewarding. Of course any errors, mistakes, omissions contained in the book are entirely the author’s responsibility and are in no way attributable to other people or programs.
Schwartzman’s Word Nerd Wordbook. Copyright © 2006 by Peter Schwartzman. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
by the author. For information, contact the author at: wordnerdauthor@gmail.com