New to the Verbal Forum? Please read this first.

Welcome to the verbal GMAT forum. This forum will become a useful tool for you if you seek to improve upon your verbal score. I hope this post will help you to get the maximum utility out of this forum.


I. Starting From the Basics

1.Find areas that need improvement

2.Get necessary materials

3.Learn the concepts and strategies

a. Basic grammar rules, idioms and SC strategies

b. Basic rules of critical reasoning and strategies

c. Reading comprehension concepts and strategies

4.Start practicing questions

a. Keep the error log

b. Participate in forum discussions

5.Review the progress with full length test

II. Advanced Verbal Preparation

1. Quick list of links for review, practice and improvement

2. What makes Verbal Questions Tough and How to Deal with them.

4. Error Analysis Again.

3. Share your knowledge and contribute to GMAT community.

For just the links and nothing extra go here - Just Links. Nothing extra.

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



GMAT Club's Ultimate Grammar Book:
E-book version (immediate download)
Printed book is available from Amazon


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.

Advanced Verbal

If you have a natural inclination to linguistics, and verbal has always been you strength or you have already reached high scores in verbal the following might help in reviewing the knowledge and using your strengths to their maximum potential.

1. Quick list of links for review.
List of Idioms - list-of-idioms-for-gmat-8281.html
Advanced grammar points by Laxieqv - advanced-grammar-points-28708.html
Brutal SC by GMATT73 - the-brutal-100-sc-test-questions-1-70-and-growing-34300.html
If X then Y, help for CR by HongHu - if-x-then-y-help-for-cr-14547.html
Logical Fallacies by HongHu - logical-fallacies-help-on-cr-and-awa-40345.html
CR Vocabulary - http://gmatclub.com/wiki/CR_vocabulary
How to improve verbal tips by Nervousgmat- 720-q42-v47-how-to-improve-verbal-tips-50635.html

Fiction Books to read, improve your RC and CR, and enjoy it.
Good books to read prior to MBA


2. Error Analysis Again
It is time to take a second glance at your errors. Since you already had some success in verbal, most likely this process is not going to be new for you. Now besides the notion of errors related to specific area of knowledge,make sure to identify the reasons why errors occur and classify them, for example:
- lack of attention/careless/tiredness, jumping to conclusions, self-assumptions;
- time pacing issues;
- fear of complex terms and passages, etc
Understanding your problem will help in finding the remedy for it.

3. What makes Verbal Questions Tough and How to Deal with them
There are many factors that contribute to the question difficulty. I have noticed several ways how the task of making a question difficult is achieved.

For Sentence Correction,
- question is appealing to more than just grammar rules
If look at most complicated SC question, you will find that they require more than just knowledge of grammar rules. In order to answer tough SC questions it's necessary to understand what the author is trying to convey. This requires good vocabulary - for understanding every part of a sentence; and logic - for figuring out the sentence idea and what is needed to be stated. This is especially true for problems involving relative pronouns. Moreover, complicated questions require knowledge of stylistics.
Solutions: Reading economic and business journals and fiction literature will help to get used to complicated sentence structures. Also, of course more practice.
Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction Guide does a great job in teaching how to tackle even the toughest SC's.

For Reading Comprehension
- question is based on scientific content
If you've been taking GMAT CAT's, you most likely noticed that many GMAT problems in the question pool are based on topics like biology (genetics, disease, and drug effectiveness) and astronomy,– the sort of thing most potential MBA candidates never give a second thought to.
Given as much as 350-400 words, you're expected to keep track of multiple arguments, and on top of that notice specific details.
Science content not only increases the difficulty for Reading Comprehension passages, but also does so for Critical Reasoning questions.
Solution: Read and share your thoughts in Science RC passages topic

4. Sharing your knowledge and contributing to GMAT community.
This "Advanced Verbal Preparation" post has a huge room for improvement, please help in this task.Your knowledge is highly valuable. Please share it with others and help them grow as well.
Post your strategies on tackling tough questions.Consider participating in this topic - Advanced Grammar Points
Collect extra hard questions and share them. Other students, who are on the same level as you, will be extremely grateful.
For example GMATT73 collected 70 extra hard SC's - THE BRUTAL SC TEST

Found a useful collection of condensed grammar points by lucky here: http://gmattoughies.blogspot.com

Found this posted in one of the old Posts on the forum - thought I'd repost



Source: http://www.salsburg.com/Faulty/Faulty.html

OG material is best but if you ran out of those questions, then sure, but you will be working with materials of questionable nature without official answers. Make sure you are familiar with rules and grammar before jumping into SC practice.

Also consider PR 1012 book.

Great post!
If anyone has any other suggestions or comments, please continue to add to this thread.

@timetrader and bb: This knowledge base is a goldmine! Thanks for sharing this!

Hi dudes,

After having a V 31 in MGMAT free test, I have decided to kick off my GMAT preparation with the verbal part. This post will be the guide line during the whole of my verbal preparation. Guys, you are gods!! I have realized after joining this club that I was living in a dark well with no info whatsoever. You have changed my thoughts, given me the oppurtunity to think about new areas.

Thanks a lot again!!

great post. thanks for all the attachments...

AWESOME!!!

Great information.

purely for practice, would you folks recommend 1000 SCs?

Super !!! Spidey - great job !

thanks a lot

Great post Spidey! It helped me a lot brushing up my basics! Thanks

This is great info guyz, I have gained a lot frm these doc's.....thanks for sharing it..

I just finished MGMAT SC. Do you recommend 1000 SC too?

Thanks Sahil and Spidy. Your notes are awesome.

I just downloaded all the docs. I am planning to go through it this weekend. I love gmatclub.