Solve the crossings first: a working order for any grid

Most stalled grids are not stalled for want of vocabulary. They are stalled because the solver worked through the clues in printed order, treated each one as a separate question, and wrote in whatever seemed likely at the time. A crossword is not a list of questions. It is a lattice, and a confirmed letter is worth more than an unread clue. What follows is a working order that suits any grid: quick or cryptic, American or British, paper or app.

1. Read every clue once, answer nothing

Begin with a pass in which you write nothing at all. Read the across clues, then the down clues, at reading speed. The aim is not to solve. The aim is to take the measure of the puzzle: whether a theme is running, how many long entries there are, how many clues are fill-in-the-blank, whether the setter is writing plain definitions or wordplay.

Two useful things happen. Several answers arrive unbidden and can be placed the moment the pass ends, which means your first written letters are your most reliable ones. And you stop over-committing to 1 Across, which is the commonest way to poison a corner before the puzzle has begun. If you want a warm start after the pass, take the fill-in-the-blank and proper-noun clues next, because those answers are either known or not known, and they rarely mislead.

2. Fill the long entries you already half know

Long entries are the highest-value squares on the board. A fifteen-letter across answer in an American grid touches fifteen down clues. Get it right and a third of the puzzle acquires a letter. Get it wrong and a third of the puzzle acquires a lie.

So treat long slots differently. A long entry is usually a phrase, a title, a themed pun or a compound, and those categories are guessable from very little. If a themed entry is clued as a play on a film title and you have two crossing letters, the phrase often resolves in one step. In British puzzles the enumeration does most of this work for you, which is why it repays reading the enumeration before the clue itself. In American puzzles you count the squares instead, and the grid tells you nothing about word breaks, so the crossings matter more, not less.

3. Work outward from your densest corner

After the first pass you will have a scatter of answers. Resist the urge to spread them evenly. Pick the corner that already holds the most letters and finish it before you move.

The reason is arithmetic. In a dense corner every new answer is checked by two or three letters you already trust, so the chance of writing in something wrong falls sharply. In an empty corner every answer is unchecked, so each one is a bet. Solvers who hop around the grid chasing clues they like end up with four half-built corners and no reliable letters anywhere. Finish one region, then let its edge letters push you into the next.

This is also the answer to the most common question about speed. Fast solvers are not reading faster. They are almost never solving an unchecked entry after the opening minute.

4. Let patterns do the guessing

Once a slot has two or three letters, stop thinking about the clue and look at the shape. English is not evenly distributed, and short slots in particular have very few plausible fillings. A four-letter pattern of _ L E O has one realistic answer in a crossword, and E _ U I has one as well. A five-letter pattern ending _ _ _ L E opens up a short, memorable family: ISLE, AISLE, ANKLE, AMPLE, NOBLE.

Learning the recurring short entries is therefore not trivia. It is a solving tool, and the reason our list of common four-letter answer patterns exists. When the pattern suggests a word, go back and read the clue to confirm it. Pattern first, clue second, in that order. The pattern narrows the field to a handful of candidates, and the clue then eliminates all but one. Doing it the other way round means testing every word you know against a clue that may be deliberately vague.

Setters know this too, which is part of why grids are built the way they are. Anyone curious about the other side of the desk can see how puzzles are constructed from the grid outwards, and it changes how you read a fill.

5. When you stall, doubt an answer

A corner that will not move is rarely a corner of hard clues. It is usually a corner containing one wrong answer that you are still treating as fact. The wrong answer is almost always a plausible word written in early, without crossings, from a clue you have not reread since.

The remedy is mechanical. Identify every answer in the dead corner that went in with no crossing letters. Rub out the one you are most certain of, because certainty without checking is the symptom, not the defence. Then read its clue again from scratch, as though you had never seen it. The full drill is set out in pencil discipline.

If the corner still resists, leave the puzzle and come back. This is not mysticism. The wrong answer is being held in place by your memory of having solved it, and that fades faster than the grid does. Solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament do not have that luxury, which is exactly why they train themselves not to write unchecked answers in the first place.

None of this changes for a cryptic. The order holds, and the opening pass matters more, because a cryptic clue read cold often yields its definition on a second look, once the surface reading has stopped distracting you. What changes is the vocabulary of signals, which is set out in the glossary. Daily practice on one consistent source helps as well: the ladder at Guardian crosswords and the Monday to Saturday curve at the New York Times both let you meet the same setters repeatedly, which is how an order of attack turns into a habit.