[petercooper]

I mean no offense by this but.. is English your mother tongue?

I used to play Scrabble a ton and adopted a more verbal, etymological style that, I'd assumed, would be more common amongst native English speakers (but maybe not!)

[zzeroparticle]

It is, but my primary strategy has been to commit a huge list of words to memory, especially the two-letter words to join new words together for point efficiency.