As everyone advices, I can tell u to push yourself to read as much as possible and keep reading whatever comes your way. But personally I felt inculcating this particular habit of reading a lot is something you cannot to start couple of months before the exam. Instead you can always start reading something you really enjoy reading. I enjoy reading Business Today a lot and sports columns in the daily papers so I make sure I read them everyday at a faster pace.
Coming to the actual RC, this is what I generally do ..for long passage I spend on an averag 3-4 minutes.
While reading the passage :
1) I read the first paragraph couple of times at a fast pace just to make sure that I am undestanding what the author is conveying or going to convey in the next couple of paragraphs. Once you do this, you can atleast guess what is going to come [Though this is not of priority but it is going to boost your confidence]
2) At the back of your mind make sure you are trying to analyse the structure passage
3) You do need to mark all the keywords, just make what is the author tone like is he being on the positive side or being political correct or trying to correct a misunderstanding (slightly critical I would say)
4) Dont worry much about the complicated words or phrases that come in between, you can always refer back if there is a question regarding them.
At the end of your reading you can atleast answer or eliminate a few choices for the answers that talk about
what is the author tone or attitude?
How is the RC structured?
What is the significance of 'x' paragraph in the passage?
These are generally posed questions so you will be able to answer 75% of the questions and for other couple of questions that refer to assumptions or inferring something will need you back to dig into the passage. since you are god at CR , I would say try to put your CR cap on and try to answer these questions.
You will definitely come out with some imporoved performance...afterall GMAT is all about practice and pattern matching
Now that I took time in atleast giving my gyan, I would love to hear your side of the success story about SC and CR, which I am definitely working on to improve.
hey... thanks for the gyan !
Here are few of the CR tips from my notes :
Always read the question stem first !
Identify the evidence, conclusion and assumption.
Critical reasoning passages normally are of the following formats
1. Premise (evidence), premise, premise, conclusion
2. Conclusion, premise, premise, premise
The conclusion can either be stated at the beginning or at the end. More importantly, do not infer too much, just stick as close to the passage as possible. Therefore, thus, so, hence, implies, indicates, etc are a few flag-posts that signal a conclusion.
Assumption questions
E.g. Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?
• Assumptions are never stated in the passage
• Assumptions support the conclusion of the passage
• Assumptions frequently work to fill in the gaps in the reasoning of the argument
• Look to see if the assumption is causal, analogical or statistical.
• If a cause is being suggested for an effect, ask your self if the cause is truly the reason for the effect, or if there might be an alternate cause.
• Argument based on analogy, compares one situation to another, ignoring the question of whether the two situations are comparable (analogous).
• If the assumption uses statistics, ask yourself if the statistics involved are representative
Strengthen the argument questions
• The statements are never stated directly in the passage
• Information will support the conclusion of passage.
• Similar logics for causal, analogies and statistics can be used as in Assumptions
• The easiest way to strengthen a passage is to strengthen the conclusion and(or) the assumptions.
Weaken the argument questions
• The above-mentioned techniques can be used in a similar way, except that it should weaken the conclusion
Inference questions
• Not directly stated in the passage
• Inferences have got little to do with the conclusion
Mimic-the-reasoning questions
If A occurs then B occurs is true
then it is necessarily true that if B does not occur then A does not occur
and not necessary that if B occurs then A occurs
If you cannot find a correct answer, try eliminating incorrect answers first!
For SC,
Review all the basic grammar rules/ concepts(nouns, types of nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, identify subject-verb, verb tenses, clauses, conjunctions, prepositions).
Memorize the idioms list (you may get the list from Knewton's concept section)
If you cannot find an error in the given sentence, try eliminating answer choices using the eight rules for sentence correction.
Finally, practice makes one perfect !!