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When you read NEDRAG, your visual system has already committed to that sequence. Psychologists call it set fixation — the original order becomes a groove your eyes keep falling back into. Every technique below is really just a way of destroying that groove.
The single biggest improvement most players make is simply writing the letters down in a different arrangement. That one habit is worth more than memorising word lists.
English is heavily suffixed. Before you attempt the whole scramble, scan for these endings and pull them out:
Take GNITSER. Pull out -ING and you're left with S, E, R — which can only reasonably be RES. Reassemble: RESTING. A seven-letter anagram just became a three-letter one.
Write your letters in a circle, a triangle, or two stacked rows. Any arrangement that isn't a straight line. This sounds trivial. It roughly halves solve time for most people, because the spatial groove disappears the moment the letters stop being a sequence.
English permits a limited set of consonant clusters. If you have T and H, they almost certainly belong together. Same for CH, SH, PH, TH, STR, SPL, THR, NG, CK. Lock those pairs as single units and your six loose letters become four movable blocks.
If your scramble contains J, Q, X, Z, or V, start there. These letters have brutally few valid neighbours. Q is followed by U in all but a handful of words. Z rarely starts a word. X almost never does. Anchoring on the rarest letter eliminates the most possibilities per second — the same logic behind opening Wordle guesses that maximise information.
Drop them into the solver and see every answer, ranked by score.