How to improve verbal?

Question

I used to be good in Quants & DI. Little rusty and out of touch. But my verbal is poor. I need someone who complements my skill so we can collaborate and improve together. I work in IST timings. First mock DI 90th percentile Quants 76th percentile but Verbal 19th percentile. Targeting this July mid or Aug mid depending upon how much progress I achieve this month. I would like help in resources and how to approach verbal so that I can improve it effectively. Thank you all.

MartyMurray · Answer

Hi Kannan.

You can get from the following post and videos insights into how to master GMAT Verbal.

How to Prepare for GMAT Verbal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVKp3TvCWxI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUNnNEkpkug

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

If you want to practice reading, articles from The Economist that are similar to those on the GMAT could be helpful. Perhaps you can squeeze in an article or two during free time you may have while at work. Regarding study buddies, consider checking out the gmatclub study buddy thread. Fair to say including official Verbal questions into a prep path would be a solid choice (the Official-Guide 2025-2026 will be released on May 28).

How to score high on GMAT Verbal.

How to score high on GMAT Verbal.

kingbucky · Answer

Wow ! You have a 90th percentile in DI, and a decent Quant, I'm sure you have the potential to quadruple your Verbal percentile. Follow strategies, strategies are most important, you can spend tens of hundreds of hours, but with the wrong strategy, you're going nowhere. To start with getting your strategy right, As  MartyMurray  pointed out, watch the videos, internalize the concepts and strategies, and the reasoning behind following them. Also read TTP blogs on Verbal strategy, and don't forget GMATNinja blogs, they contain so much treasure in their content. 
All the best Kannan !

kingbucky · Answer

GmatKnightTutor  Can you please tell me how I can improve my RC speed, I'm so slow at reading. I'll list my problems:
1) I read so slowly. 
2) As I'm reading I hear what I'm reading, like vocalization inside.
3) Given enough time, I can get a good score in verbal, but timing is what creates the problem for me. I'm unable to manage the timing.

My reading speed also affects reading heavy sections in DI like MSR.

I have bought Norman Lewis "How to Read Better and Faster" book, I'm yet to start reading. Do you recommend such books ? Will they be helpful, if I'm planning to take my test in 3 months ? You mentioned The Economist, can you make a list of daily rituals or routines I should blindly follow to automatically improve my reading comprehension in the next 90 days. I want to quadruple my reading speed, as I think it's possible because I'm starting at almost 5th grader level at speed reading.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Since you are looking for verbal help. here is a great article you can check out:

How to Score High on GMAT Verbal on the Focus Edition

EducationAisle · Answer

Since you mention Verbal as your specific area of concern, thought I would mention that our Critical Reasoning book  Critical Reasoning Nirvana  is perhaps the  only  book that offers a score improvement  guarantee .

After reading the book  twice  (yes! it's an  academic  book, and so must be read twice in all seriousness, to  reinforce  the concepts), you will start looking forward to solving CR questions!

If you want to  sample  a chapter before deciding to go ahead with our book, please DM me your mail-id (along with the chapter that you would like to sample) and we will be happy to send that chapter to you by mail.

p.s. The book is available on  Amazon  and  Flipkart .

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi mvgkannan,

To increase your verbal score, you must identify your exact weaknesses, fill in any knowledge gaps, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to find weaker areas, learn all about how to answer questions of types that you aren't that comfortable with now, and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving your score up point by point.

For example, assume you begin studying Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to master the individual Critical Reasoning topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why you didn't get it right. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you would have had to know in order to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

Regarding RC, when students get those questions wrong, it’s partly because they don't truly understand what they have just read. To understand what you are reading, you may have to slow down even more (for now) in order to eventually speed up. You have to learn to comprehend what you read, keep it all straight, and use what you are reading to arrive at correct answers.

At this point, your best bet is to focus on getting the correct answers to questions, taking **as much time as you need** to see key details and understand the logic of what you are reading. If you don't understand something, go back and read it one sentence at a time, even one word at a time, not moving on until you understand what you have just read. There is no way around this work. Your goal should be to take all the time you need to understand exactly what is being said and arrive at the correct answer. If you can learn to get answers taking your time, you can learn to speed up. Answering questions is like any task: The more times you do it carefully and successfully, the faster you become at doing it carefully and successfully.

Another component to understanding what you are reading is being “present” when reading. Don’t worry about how things are going at work, or what you will eat for dinner, or even how long you’re taking to read through the passage. Just focus on what is in front of you, word by word, line by line. Furthermore, try to make reading fun. For example, even if you are reading about a topic that bores you, pretend that you are the person making the argument. By doing so, you will make the passage more relatable to YOU, and ultimately you should be able to read with greater focus.

One final component of Reading Comprehension that may be tripping you up is that RC questions contain one or more trap answers that seem to answer the question but don't really. So, a key part of training to correctly answer RC questions is learning to notice the differences between trap answers and correct answers. You have to learn to see how trap answers seem to follow from what the passages say, but don't really, while correct answers fit what the passages say exactly. Of course, the better you become at noticing the differences between trap answer choices and correct answers, the faster you will answer RC questions.

Here is also a great article that you can check out:

How to Score High on GMAT Verbal on the Focus Edition

RetaketheGMAT · Answer

You need significant improvement of your verbal score so you need be really efficient to achieve that in a reasonable timeframe.

As you're working through topic by topic, make you focus on two things:

1) understanding the mistakes you made on each question
2) strategies that apply to question types that go beyond just one question

The latter will align your readiness to the way the GMAT tests you in verbal (and Q and DI):
-- not just comprehension / reading skills but also consistently good process when answering questions especially in CR which depends heavily on great test taking skills.

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