A thirty-day solving routine

This is the last lesson of the beginner course, and it is a schedule rather than an idea. Thirty days of deliberate solving, half an hour at a time, takes most people from finishing an easy weekday grid to holding their own against a gentle cryptic. The plan matters less than the two rules attached to it: one puzzle a day, and no checking until you have genuinely stopped.

The shape of the month

Days 1 to 7: finish something

Solve one easy grid a day, a Monday or Tuesday from the New York Times crosswords or any quick crossword, with no check button and no word finder. Give it thirty minutes, then stop and look at the answers if you have to, but read every answer you missed rather than glancing at the grid.

Keep a notebook, paper or a file. Write down every entry you did not know, especially the short ones. By the end of the week that page will already be repeating itself, which is the point: the recurring short answers covered in the lesson on fill words are a finite set, and a week of noticing them is worth more than any list.

Days 8 to 14: build the method

Move up a level and change how you start. Read every clue once and answer only what arrives instantly, then work outward from your densest corner. That order is set out in full in the guide to solving the crossings first, and this is the week to make it automatic.

Add one habit: when a corner stalls, stop rereading clues and go back to the answer you were most confident about. It is usually the blockage. By day 14 you should be finishing a midweek puzzle most days, with one checked square at the end at worst.

Days 15 to 21: one cryptic clue a day

Keep solving a daily grid, and add a single cryptic clue. Not a cryptic puzzle. One clue, solved slowly, with the explanation read afterwards. A daily one clue puzzle such as a single cryptic clue a day suits this exactly, and so does working through the Guardian beginners series.

Spend the week learning indicators rather than answers. By day 21 you should recognise an anagram indicator on sight, know that hidden words are signalled by words like some of and held by, and test both ends of every clue for the definition. Work through the clue by clue walkthrough on day 21 itself, when the vocabulary is fresh.

Days 22 to 30: a whole cryptic

Solve Thursday level puzzles for the first three days of this stretch. Gimmick days force you to notice the grid rather than the clue list, and a rebus you spot yourself is worth a week of reading about rebuses.

Then attempt a complete gentle cryptic: a Quiptic, a Quick Cryptic or an Everyman, chosen using the weekly difficulty curve. Expect to finish a third of it. Solve it again two days later with the solution beside you, reading the explanation for every clue you missed. Do that twice in the final week, and on day 30 start a fresh one cold.

Milestones, and missing them

Four checkpoints tell you whether the month is working, and none of them involve speed, which is a later concern belonging to competitive solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament: an easy grid finished unaided by day 7, a midweek grid finished with at most one checked square by day 14, five cryptic clues solved without help by day 21, and a third of a gentle cryptic by day 30.

If a checkpoint fails, repeat that week rather than moving on. The schedule is not the achievement. Solvers who stall almost always skipped forward from a level they had not consolidated, and the fix is a boring fortnight at the level that felt too easy. Any term used here is defined in the glossary.