We were concerned that you could improve your score by memorizing vocabulary lists.

I worked hard at memorizing lists of facts and figures, and carried with me a book of facts.

That was a closer match than score indicated. It was 27-26 as far as I'm concerned.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

The family's very concerned, obviously.