When I was a kid, I used to love games of all kinds. In this respect, I wasn't different from your typical kid. My favorite games, however, were not typical – I loved word games of any kind. I loved crossword puzzles, word scrambles, Scrabble, Boggle – you name it and I would play. My favorite game, however, was the word search puzzle. I knew that word search puzzles were pretty easy, and that they were not the most interesting games, but I didn't care. You see, we would get a different word search puzzle every Friday in science class, and it was always a competition to see who could finish first – a competition that I could usually win.
The first time I got a word search puzzle, I tried to go through the slow way. I would go line by line, letter by letter, looking for the first word in the list. Then I would look for the second, third, etc. until I was finished. Then one day, I had a revelation – there are easier ways to do word search puzzles. I tried looking for several words at once, and I got much better results. Soon, I was in the top half of the class. Then I had another breakthrough.
When I was looking through the word search puzzle, I suddenly saw a word that I wasn't searching for. It happened to be one of the vocabulary words (as I quickly found out) so I circled it. I don't know why I had missed it at the time – probably because I wasn't very old – but now I saw a new wrinkle in the word search puzzle game; you didn't have to memorize the word list before you started looking. As long as you could recognize all the words in the word search game, you could sort of let your eyes unfocused and start looking for patterns.
At first, it wasn't a very fast method. I would seen nothing but rows and rows of meaningless letters. Soon, however, words started to jump out at me. Before long, I could do more than half of the word search puzzle without ever looking for any words in particular. I was getting faster and faster, which meant that I got to go to recess earlier and earlier. It isn't hard to imagine why I loved the word search puzzles – every kid loves recess, and every kid particularly loves being able to leave early for the day.
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