my experience

1. Awa preparation is inbuilt in the PP and the Kaplan CD's. Also the toefl CD which comes alongwith the exam toolkit from ETS is a good source. Many previous GMAT takers were of the opinion that you try to prepare all the topics at the end of OG, I tried that and found myself in a bottomless pit and had to abandon it. Net, The basic rules given at the end of OG for awa are the best bet. Sentence structuring, transition phrases, paragraph modeling and making sure that there are no , absolutely no , spelling mistakes while typing are some of the basic rules. One may like to give at least two examples in both the areas of AWA.

2. RC - I had a similar problem to start with. I found the material of Kaplan book a much better preparation ground. The icing on the cake is OG. There is NO other preparation material for RC that comes even close. IMO, it is imperative that one does RC from OG in a systematic way. The RC answers in OG are very well defined and this is where the maximum time and attention goes. Please make sure that you touch OG AFTER you are through with both the powerprep tests. May be one can take one/two passages per day and practice with the answers after having attempted the questions. Do let me know of this exercise.

3. Download the Free GRE Powerprep. This ETS software also has some pretty interesting practice for both AWA and RC - and it is coming from ETS, free !. Don't miss it.

Best of Luck.

Hi anupag
I have a similar problem with previous post.............
RC section for non-native takers is very difficiult because we have not enough vocabulary to tackle this articles. Take example, I could crack those question in an essay if I comprehended this whole essay, digesting into summary in own word. In contrast, I can't do well on those question even though I have learned reading skills from books.
Thus, I begin to memorize amount vocabularies to deal with RC section.
In addition,in CR exercise, I have tired of doing questions of OG and kaplan . Could you think whether I re-take those questions in OG and Kaplan or shall I scout for new materials as practice ? In fact, I find CR section is difficult to improve obviously in scores. I tried the way from kaplan to tackle CR, but I find I still don't do well on practice test. Do you have the alternative way ? I think I need your help.............
Thank you!

I am also a non-native speaker and I have also struggled with the same problem. I do believe two things
1. Somehow whenever we try to redo a question, we will always end up with the right answer and that too in a very short time. Therefore recycling questions just does not work. That is why we need to do PP before OG. And therefore my advice would be to NEVER take a test again, it would be a waste of time. This also means that one needs to be extremely careful before attempting a test, since quality questions are very very few - PP and Kaplan tests are probably the only good sources.

2. CR took a lot of time for me to get closer to being 80-90% correct responses. I found Kaplan practice exercises and explanations to be the basic. Then we need to assault OG, question by question. There is no point in doing a lot of questions and just see the answers for a right/wrong analysis. The support from OG comes from its depth of responses for the answers - and this is what takes up a lot of time.

For me, since I come back from office only after 9:00 pm, it was a hard struggle. I am sure luck will smile on all of you !