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Select the Right Crossword Puzzles
The first step to improving your crossword solving skills is to choose the right crossword puzzles to practice on! That means choosing puzzles that are well made and of the right difficulty level for you. Let's break that down...
How to recognize well-made crossword puzzles
Crossword making is an art form, and very few people are really good at it. This isn't the right place to get into the ins and outs of crossword construction, but let me give you an example of a useful sign-post.
Crosswords often make use of very obscure words or facts that hardly anybody is likely to know. Such entries are often referred to as crosswordese, and looked upon by most as a necessary evil. One tell-tale sign of a good crossword puzzle is that it uses minimal crosswordese, and that when it does resort to a really obscure word, the crossing entries (i.e. the words that pass through the obscure word) are not equally obscure.
There are many other signs of a good crossword puzzle of course, but an easier way to decide is to simply stick with crosswords having a reliable pedigree. By that, I mean crossword puzzles that are made by a respected constructor (or at least edited by a highly-regarded editor) and published in a quality publication or website.
Which ones are they? Ask the experts! A very comprehensive list of crossword puzzles with that kind of pedigree was very generously compiled for Word-Buff by the crossword solving champion, Dan Feyer.
How to get the right difficulty-level
Fortunately, many crossword publications provide some indicator of the level of difficulty of their puzzles. Some, like Brendan Emmet Quigley, give an explicit difficulty tag (in his case: Easy, Medium, or Hard), while others, most notably the New York Times crossword, use the day-of-the-week to measure difficulty. In New York Times puzzles, for example, Monday puzzles are the easiest and Saturday's are the hardest.
You need to start with a level of difficulty that matches your current ability, and work your way upwards. It's best to start with crossword puzzles that you can almost solve completely, but not quite. That way you'll learn something new with each puzzle, without shattering your confidence.
Rather than than wait for Saturday's challenge, crossword solving whiz Dan Feyer recommends increasing the difficulty of an early-in-the-week puzzle by solving only the Across clues or Down clues, or by only solving clues for which no letters have yet been filled in.
