Fox-1, you're absolutely right in saying that knowing what is likely to be said is tremendously helpful. I found that out very recently.
I'm just back from doing the CPL(H) flying course down at Gloucester (not quite finished, but that's another story). The last nav ex I did involved finding two points in the Cotswolds identified only by grid references, going through both Lyneham and Brize MATZes (what's the plural of MATZ?), in a strongish wind and lowish cloudbase. So it was high workload and not a lot of time to think about what to say on the radio, especially in a R22 where you can't write anything down and you're juggling a half mil chart and two OS maps anyway. Well, it got worse than that. Lyneham and Brize were preparing for World War 3 I think, at any rate they didn't want a little R22 on a nav ex bumbling through their zones, and both routed me around, in a fashion which was highly complicated if you didn't know the area, for example: "remain south of some-town-or-other and east of junction 16". Help, where are they? I kept it together (I even found both destinations!), but I really struggled, and often had to ask the obviously overworked controllers to "Say again".
Well, afterwards (when I'd recovered!) my instructor pointed out that even though I didn't know what to expect, I knew what they were doing; they were routing me around the zone. So if they started off sending me east, next heading was likely to be approximately north-east, then north. So despite having to cope with the unexpected, some of it was predictable, which would ease the workload.
I'd thought I could cope with the radio, and I could, normally. But I learned something very useful about it that day.
Nevertheless, I hope I never have to do that again!