Solving Tips

[fishbum]

This not a "solving" tip but a way of completing 'grams in a relaxing manner. It assumes you are not in any competitive mode other than finding the solution. I use the on-screen keyboard, set my 'smart' mouses extra button for 'delete', sit back and solve while drinking my coffee with my free hand. I don't start with the first word and type straight through like some folks are capable of doing.

[Barnabas]

Just moving this thread back to page 1 with this reply. Beginners... refer to page 1 and dig into these little treasures of wisdom from some of the best solvers who have been here for a long long time.

[doomspark]

I look at 3-letter words. If all three letters are different, and the first and third letters occur more often than the second, I put in THE and see if that gives me anything. If all three letters are close in frequency, I try ARE or AND. If the first and third letters are lower than the middle, I try YOU. If the first is significantly lower than the second and third, I try CAN.

Something like X-B-D-X is likely to be THAT.

"XF XL" can be "IT IS" or "IS IT" or even "IS IN" - but the first letter is almost certainly an I.

[wvwoman]

hint: the word "the" almost never immediately precedes a two-letter word.

[wvwoman]

success!

"success" has an easy-to-spot letter pattern--"succeed", too. (i love those double sets of double letters!)

[wvwoman]

eeeeee!

two-letter words seldom start with an 'e'.

[ernests]

While I've been trying to get my speed up, I've developed a 'bounce and scan' approach to working through a clue.

After filling in some letters, there may be parts of the puzzle which have an obvious (or highly probable) solution, so I go along filling in letters while I can. At some point I may get to a word that isn't immediately obvious. Instead of taking time to puzzle over this word, I want to get back to filling in more letters ASAP, so, as soon as I get any resistance at all from a word, I 'bounce' off it and switch to rapidly scanning the rest of the puzzle for another obvious part. If there is one (and there often is) I can quickly skip to that and carry on filling in more letters. Basically I want to be typing, not thinking.

[ddph]

Two letter words almost never end in "I".

[Barnabas]

Basically I want to be typing, not thinking.

And blinking your eyes That's a good strategy, and I've done something very similar. If I can see that I'm right about several words in the puzzle but there's one or two that are a bit off, I complete as much as I can. Then I'll hit the reset button, go back to the words I knew I was right about, fill them in, and then I can often see where my mistakes were with the ones that were off.

[montyb]

Pi, eh?

[imported_Lurker]

Hi.

Well, oddcouple did say "almost"

[LLapp]

And wvwoman did say "seldom."

[LLapp]

Two warnings about logical meanings:

1. There are punctuation errors. Most of the quotes are fine, but more than a few of them have missing or incorrect punctuation. This means the usual clues that you might take from commas or periods or hyphens may not apply. For example, there are quotes where the subject and verb are separated by a comma for no reason, or where three sentences are strung together with a couple of commas instead of periods. Oh -- and there are some quotes where a dash is shown as a hyphen, so that the opening of this sentence would look like this: BF-YLP DFQGQ (for "Oh -- and there").

2. Abbreviations and acronyms have no periods, so there's no clue in the puzzle that they are not normal words. A frequent culprit is "TV": if you see T_, that word will be "TO" 99% of the time, but if the O is already used, then try TV instead.

Quirks like those can throw you if you are looking for logical meaning. So if the logic isn't working but you are still finding good letter patterns, keep going; just keep decrypting words without expecting logic. You'll either hit a wall and will have to reset, or you'll suddenly see a decrypted quote that you never expected to appear.

[imported_Lurker]

Adding to that, beware of WWI and WWII, or even worse World War II. There may even be a WWIII in one quote. And if a contraction is by Pope, consider a D as the apostrophe'd letter.