How to Improve Your Verbal GMAT Score: Starting From the Basics

1. Find areas that need improvement
Find out your weak areas. Every section, Section Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension has its own challenges and strategies how to overcome them. Take a GMATPrep or another free diagnostic GMAT test to identify areas of improvement.

2.Get necessary materials
When you get know your weakness don't rush into solving as many problems as you can. First make sure to learn the concepts. Get a good book. The choice will depend on your need. If you really struggle with verbal, consider buying specific books that cover each topic in detail.
Best GMAT Verbal Prep Books (Reviews & Recommendations)


3.Learn the concepts and strategies
Firstly, note that it's vital to learn the concepts first than move on to strategies. Tricks alone won't do the job for getting a high GMAT score.

Sentence Correction
It is claimed that SC is the area that is the easiest to improve on. In addition this section can be a real time saver for you because after mastering this topic solving a question takes 1 minute on average.

-Learn the rules. Make sure you understand why one answer is correct and other answers are wrong.

-Create Notes. This will help to memorize rules, and will ease the task of refreshing your knowledge, since you can always carry them with you. You might consider making them in a flash card format.

---Here some Examples of created notes by other users. But again those are just great examples, create your own notes!

and Anandnk's notes

---(!) Remember, that you can always ask for help from other forum users if you don't understand certain rule.

-Learn the idioms and improve your vocabulary. Here is a list of idioms, common redundancies and most used vocabulary words created by forum users, you may find it useful.

Take an online Idioms test (30+ idioms) or download a PDF version.
Another list of Idioms - MS Word



Useful links for SC:
useful-links-for-sc-83536.html

Sentence Correction Blog:
http://www.prachipareekh.net/

And this blog with more "user friendly" search:
http://gmat-grammar.blogspot.com/


Critical Reasoning
You don’t have to know the grammar or spelling here. It’s really ALL about the logic. Again, learn the concepts first. Some useful threads to read.:
HongHu's thread on logical reasoning - If X then Y, CR Help and Logical Fallacies, CR and AWA Help
Paul's definitions - СR Vocabulary
CR Principles for beginners

Reading Comprehension
For majority of people there is only one problem in this section - Lack of TIME. Now, there is no universal remedy to this problem.
Some strategies are discussed here- RC Timing Join in the discussion.
Maybe - Doing RC without reading the passage by Rhyme will work for you?
Or is the Gin's Technique of thorough reading is for you?

Still scacred of the RC? Don't be shy. Post here - Very scared of the RC
After getting to know the concepts of RС, you can try different strategies to see which ones will work best for you.


4. Practice Questions
Practice, review, practice, review...

- For practice in the timed environment you will find GMAT Timer tool useful. Use in conjunction with error log.

- It is very important to keep the error log. This invaluable tool will help you to monitor your progress and find areas that need the most improvement. To read all about the error log, and how to get the maximum utility out of it go here - All about the error log..

Participate in verbal forum discussions.

- Please take time to read the

Etiquette for forum participation

- Give the reasons for choosing the answer

- Participation in forum discussions is great to fixate the knowledge attained from studies and practice. Try explaining some concept to several people and you yourself will remember it for a long time.

- If you have trouble understanding some kind of a question, go ahead and post in on the forum

- To get 70 extra hard SC questions for practice visit GMATT73's thread THE BRUTAL SC TEST (More than 2000 downloads!)

- We are working on other compilations, so if you have something to share, please do!

5.Review the progress with full length test
After you feel that you progressed enough check yourself on the full length CAT test.


Other useful links:
Study Plan:

Grammar references
1. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
2. http://www.bartleby.com/64/
Useful Things to know for SC


Special thanks to: Nervousgmat who wrote an awesome post- 720 (Q42, V47): HOW TO IMPROVE VERBAL - TIPS (highly recommend to read it)
And also Walker, Jasonc, Praetorian and all the people mentioned above who shared their knowledge, experience and contributed to this forum.