When I’m stumped, I plug it into Hal, and it works every time. Almost always, the most frequent letter is “E”...This time Hal didn’t work.
When I saw the two words with the same ending, it told me, it has to be one of only three or four.
Like you there are key things I look for. The, that and E are some of those I look for. A few others I will not reveal for competition purposes. hehehehehe
If I was trained in statistics, might start looking at the frequency of letters being used. Have a half-arsed list gong on sticky pads to track the first thee most common letters reported by Hal. Sometimes it does work to get me off the dime.