Improving vocabulary & verbal score

[TestEagle]

Let us discuss good strategy to improve verbal score.

[anonymous_soc]

My two cents:

1) Study vocabulary. A huge portion of your verbal score hinges on this. That being said, it's important to understand both denotative and connotative definitions of the words you're studying. I think I went through about 1500 vocabulary words during my prep.

2) If you're trying to break into the upper echelon of scores (165+), I highly recommend studying reading comprehension and paragraph argument questions from LSAT study materials. The LSAT has more types of paragraph argument questions (they call them logical reasoning). I would especially focus on LSAT flaw, strengthen, and weaken LR questions. By and large, these are pretty identical to the few paragraph arguments you'll see on the GRE, but more difficult. I definitely believe my LSAT prep (I was a law school aspirant prior to deciding on pursuing a PhD) was a huge factor in preparing me well for the verbal section of the GRE.

3) Reading challenging material is a sure fire way to help you improve on the reading comprehension portions of the verbal section.

4) Dedicate time. Improving a verbal score greatly takes a lot of effort. But it most definitely pays off.

[pascal_barbots_wager]

My two cents:

 

. . .

 

3) Reading challenging material is a sure fire way to help you improve on the reading comprehension portions of the verbal section.

 

Second this. Reading something like The Economist will improve both reading comprehension and vocabulary. Plus you'll stay up on current events!

Edited January 18, 2015 by pascal_barbots_wager

[anonymous_soc]

Second this. Reading something like The Economist will improve both reading comprehension and vocabulary. Plus you'll stay up on current events!

The Economist was one of my "go to" sources for challenging reading material. Also, as you mentioned, keeping abreast of recent happenings is great.

[braindump]

I just downloaded GRE vocab apps for my phone and turned those into a habitual method of study. My favorite was the Magoosh app, which separates words into different decks and has them appear with a specific frequency based on how well you seem to know them. I would just run through vocab for ~10 minutes at a time several times a day (waiting in line/on the bus, eating a snack, bored in class.. etc). A few weeks after having finished a particular deck I'd go through it again and refresh. My GRE course over the summer taught that the best way to learn vocab is either contextually (reading The Economist is a great idea.. wish I'd thought of it last semester) or in short, frequent bursts, rather than, say, hour long sessions.

[Chubberubber]

I did exactly what braindump did anf it seriously helped me! However, I realized that there's no need to get into anything over the "common words" on the magoosh app. The chances of encountering a word that's not on the common words list on the actual test are slim to almost non (at least based on my limited experience).

 

Also, as annoying as it may be to your surroundings, I tried to integrate as many of new words I learned into conversations. It really helped me remember them and understand when is appropriate to use each word. 

[TakeruK]

I would also recommend the strategy of "simply memorize as many common words as you can". I used the word lists from this page: http://www.majortests.com/gre/wordlist.php

 

I only made it through the first five word lists (500 words). These word lists are arranged so that each list has a good representation of words from all over the alphabet (so it's okay to just take a subset of the 10-15 lists provided). I had about 6 weeks to prepare for the General GRE (my MSc courses ended in April, test was scheduled in June, started in mid-May) and I got through about 100 words per week studying for about 2-3 hours per week. I didn't have time to dedicate much more than that because I had a lot of other things to do too (MSc research, planning my wedding etc.)

 

I found that personally, I memorize (not learn, just memorize) better when I have moderate length sessions. At first, I was fitting in 10-15 minutes here and there to study and that wasn't very good. I worked a lot better when I could dedicate an entire hour to going through the same 100 words over and over and over and over again. So two or three of these 1-hour sessions per week was ideal for me to learn. 

 

I also agree that having context helped me learn the words. However, I didn't try to use them in everyday conversation because well, it's pretty hard to fit most of those words into everyday use, and especially not without sounding incredibly pretentious! Instead, I decided that the best "context" to use these words is in GRE test questions! Luckily, the same website has GRE-like questions based on the same words in the wordlist, so I alternated memorizing form the list and then answering questions based on words from the same list. 

 

Finally, I would also dedicate some time to learning how the test works. I really think the GRE is maybe 70% knowledge and 30% understanding how to take the test. I also dedicated about 1 hour per week to just take practice GRE test questions to get used to the format and learning what ETS is expecting from their questions and learning why they ask the questions the way they do.

 

Overall, this strategy worked really really well for me on the test day. It has done nothing to actually teach me the words though, because I remember almost none of the words I memorized. That's fine with me though, I didn't want to actually learn the words, I just needed them to do well on the test

[braindump]

Finally, I would also dedicate some time to learning how the test works. I really think the GRE is maybe 70% knowledge and 30% understanding how to take the test. I also dedicated about 1 hour per week to just take practice GRE test questions to get used to the format and learning what ETS is expecting from their questions and learning why they ask the questions the way they do.

 

Also this is very important! I'd actually say way more than 30%. I definitely recommend going through some books or guides and seeing what they say about the test format. My GRE course drilled that the test really doesn't test your knowledge (it's too arbitrary) but more so, your ability to take the test. So become familiar with how to take the test and what ETS is looking for.

[Brent@GreenlightGRE]

If you're looking for interesting, GRE-like content, here some additional suggestions.

 

For Science passages, try:

- New Scientist

- Nature

- National Geographic

- Popular Mechanics

- Scientific American

 

For Humanities/Social Sciences, try:

- Washington Post

- New York Times

- Guardian

- Atlantic Monthly

- The New Yorker

 

And for Business, try:

- Fast Company

- Newsweek Business

- The Harvard Business Review

- BusinessWeek

- Economist

- Financial Times

 

As far as GRE vocab goes, we have 2 free GRE word lists on Quizlet: 

- 500 commonly-tested GRE words (basic): http://quizlet.com/1...c-flash-cards/#

- 500 more GRE words (advanced): http://quizlet.com/1...ed-flash-cards/

 

Cheers,

Brent - Greenlight Test Prep

[dicapino]

My opinion. Got 159 on the verbal.

1) Magoosh vocab app.

2) Read copies of the economist and the newyorker.(new words and sentence variety)

3) Manhattan reading comprehension guide (pls ignore the Tc and Se in thatbook)

4) Magoosh videos for TC and SE.

5) Practice verbal questions from the Ets official guide and verbal practice question.

I did this dilligently and I got a good score. International student from Nigeria.

My 5cents

NB- on test day I found out that the ETS does not use complex vocab.But they tinker with the sentence structure. So dont inundate yourself with excess vocab.

Edited January 20, 2015 by dicapino

[braindump]

NB- on test day I found out that the ETS does not use complex vocab.But they tinker with the sentence structure. So dont inundate yourself with excess vocab.

 

I actually think this is not necessarily true. Sometimes you might get lucky and get less complex words but I I actually felt I got stuck with a pretty wide variety of complex words. I think it's a toss-up.

 

Also, another tip: do the practice GRE exams provided by ETS! They're free and exactly like the real test. I treated it as if I was taking the real exam: no breaks, no distractions, essays, the works. It helps a ton to get the hang of timing.

[dicapino]

I actually think this is not necessarily true. Sometimes you might get lucky and get less complex words but I I actually felt I got stuck with a pretty wide variety of complex words. I think it's a toss-up.

Also, another tip: do the practice GRE exams provided by ETS! They're free and exactly like the real test. I treated it as if I was taking the real exam: no breaks, no distractions, essays, the works. It helps a ton to get the hang of timing.

Yeah may have been luck.The coin could have tossed anyway. But I really dont buy the idea of memorizing a 5000 wordlist from Baron or any test prep. It is very taxing and I fret at such measures.

But I agree with original post practice with Ets questions- very important.

[crackoo]

If you want to master the GRE Wordlist and track your progress as you go along, check out http://www.crackoo.com

Edited July 13, 2015 by crackoo