M2M Day 263: This is a really useful insight
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.
A few days ago, I started adding non-Saturday crosswords (i.e. “easier puzzles”) into my training routine. The goal, according to my three-part training framework, is to use these easier puzzles to develop a more mature strategy for the end of a puzzle, which I can then apply to my Saturday crosswords as I (hopefully) start getting to that point.
Today, to continue training for these end of puzzle situations, I focused on solving a couple of Friday puzzles (which are close enough to Saturdays for the insights to be relevant, but easy enough where I can actually generate the necessary “end-game” insights).
Here’s one of the Friday puzzles that I completed today…

You’ll notice that I botched eight of the squares on my first try, as denoted by the black triangles.
Retrospectively, there’s no reason that I should have incorrectly filled in these squares: When I clicked the check button, to confirm my answers, I knew there were a handful of words in the puzzle that I didn’t recognize.
Sure enough, these exact “words” just happened to contain the error-filled squares.
Upon fixing these squares, all the previously unidentifiable words magically became pretty standard words (i.e. emote, sickos, churchy, gods, quiches, agree).
I don’t remember what nonsense words I had in place of these normal-looking words, but they were certainly nonsense.
I had convinced myself that “A Saturday puzzle is a hard puzzle. Therefore, it’s going to contain hard words. Some of these hard words I just won’t recognize”.
But this is actually rarely the case: The NYT increases puzzle difficulty almost entirely with its cluing difficulty, and not with the obscurity of its answers.
So, if I see a word that I don’t recognize, it probably contains an error.
This insight now seems obvious, but, before explicitly recognizing it, I continued to make this same kind of error (i.e. submitting unrecognizable words) over and over again.
Anyway, my end-of-puzzle approach is starting to come into focus: Once I’ve filled in the entire puzzle, I should read through and find any word that I don’t recognize. Then, I should assume this answer is incorrect, and try to figure out how to make the answer into a real word by changing one or two of the squares (before ever looking at the clue). Finally, once I’ve determine the most reasonably likely real-word answer, I should check the clue and see if I can use it to justify the answer . If so, great. If not, it’s still likely correct.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
