hypervodka

Hahaha, it looks like him.

A healthy dose of ecocriticism in response to the devastation of the Vietnam War, tbh. All you need. That's fair. (Kidding.)

I've got to say, I haven't always been a fan of Picasso. Then I went to his museum, which has an enormous collection of his paintings, ordered chronologically from boyhood. His process is astounding. Las Meninas is stupendous, exhausting, and itself ekphrasistic.

I noticed a pretty pattern: a lot of great paintings are now doubling as GradCafe avatars. I'd love to know why you all chose the paintings you did. My icon is from Thomas Anshutz's A Rose (1907). Anshutz's portraiture is always very dynamic. I love this painting in particular because of the look of undisguised disgust/boredom on her face, despite her elegant pose. It's at the Met still, I believe.

I found this post from another thread very useful. Main points: write a different SOP for each school and do A LOT of research. Personally, not a fan of the first part.

I'm available as well.

Do you guys know of any essay review websites? Either crowd-sharing, or a paid service. I know about EssayEdge, which is about $200. I'm sure you can imagine the number of spam websites that come up when you type in "essay review service," so I thought it'd be helpful to make a thread. Coffee-drinkers are also exchanging essays in another post.

People in the humanities are typically very aware of language barriers and other factors that could lead to poor scores on a timed (and, in a lot of way, useless) exam. The exam is supposed to help demonstrate your proficiency in English literature, and I'm sure you'll prove that in other ways. Good luck!

The GRE is no where near the most important part of your application. There's absolutely nothing you can do about that now, so please try not dwell on it. Focusing on crafting an extremely strong writing sample. If you have an excellent GPA, I wouldn't address the GRE in your SOP. Professors are well-aware that this exam is a bit of a crapshoot anyway--they've accepted students with extraordinarily low scores, rejected students in the 90th percentile. Sorry, and good luck.

Does anyone have anything to add to what omensetter said about time? For my part, when I took the practice tests, I typically finished about 35 minutes before time; during the actual test, I finished maybe closer to thirty, so not a large difference at all. There was nothing surprising about the formatting for me, and the reading was actually a little easier for me than taking the practice tests (probably because I practiced on the computer--on paper, it's a lot easier to stay focused and to viciously cross out wrong answers). For anyone taking the October date, I recommend taking at least one test a week until then... a lot of things will really stop surprising you.

I don't think you should think too hard about font choice. A good takeaway from this would be to possibly have all drafts in sans-serif regardless on the computer and serif anytime you print it out, because both options will help you read the text and spot mistakes.

For that reason, UC Berkeley in particular does care a lot about scores. But your application can be otherwise exemplary. If you don't think you can change your score (you can't afford to take it, don't have the time, can't study, truly tried your hardest the first time), then there is really no use in worrying about it. Spend more time perfecting the aspects of your application the schools care the absolute most about: SOP and writing sample.

I got a 5.5 just writing rambling gibberish, I swear. Just follow the instructions from Princeton Review. They don't care how well you write or how big your words are. They only care that you make valid point after point after point. I don't remember much (this was a couple of years ago), but one of the essays is compare and contrast. So, my paragraph 1 was just similarity after similarity. Paragraph 2 was difference after difference. Inelegant, but it really works.

I'm going through one test now. This is from GR9964, so skip this if you were saving that one. One question asks: It doesn't even matter the context of the passage. As I said before, we're looking for some archaic, unfamiliar usage of the word "abroad." That's the only reason they would ask this question. The answer choices are: (A) should be eliminated immediately, without reading the context, because that is the contemporary usage. (D) is extremely similar, so I'd strike that out as well. Now, the referenced sentence is,"Reform was in the air--political, social, religious; there was even a feeling abroad that our great public schools were not quite all that they should be, and that some change or other--no one precisely knew what--but some change in the system of their management was highly desirable." This is a very egocentric sentence. Reform was in the air--not foreign air, our air. It doesn't make sense for non-English speakers to be invested enough in the English education system for any solution whatsoever to be "highly desirable." Again, (A) and (D) just don't fit. (B ) and (C ) are virtual synonyms. I've noticed that a lot of questions of the kind match the answer choices in "pairs," and the odd one out is the correct answer. Both (A) and (D) kind of sort of mean "foreign" and both (B ) and (C ) kind of sort of mean "off-base." Just think of this from a technical standpoint: the test-writers would not make the correct choice too similar to any other erroneous answer choice. There won't be a passage about Mr. Rochester, and then both Emily and Charlotte listed among the answer choices. They're not trying to trick wrong answers out of you. (E) ("prevalent at the time") makes the most sense in the sentence, which, again, is very egocentric, but also emboldended with a sense of general urgency. Everyone had opinion about changes in the school system, even though "no one knew precisely what" that change would entail. This answer choice makes sense in the sentence, and in the passage. It is also the answer choice furthest from the contemporary definition, which seems to often be the case.

That's awesome, thanks for sharing! Can you give an example of one of these questions? On this text, when they ask you what a word means, they are most probably asking you for an archaic usage of the word, which should be gleaned from context (though they probably expect familiarity with the text itself). One more criticism of the $7 text (which was pretty handy for making flashcards, since the lists are already there) that I wanted to hold off on until I took an actual ETS test: I got a 650, and I can pretty much confirm that all of the "examples" on the Smart Students' Guide are much too difficult to be worth practicing on.

So, BeginsinWonder recommended Smart Student's Guide in another thread. It's only $7, so I'd recommend it in a, well, it can't hurt, kind of way. It's extremely detailed, but it's organized extremely poorly. Just list upon list of texts, authors, and literary periods in alphabetical order. This is probably more helpful to the people in the October date, who'd have more time with it. It doesn't work well as a primary study text, because if you read it straight through, you'll go from Amis to Austen to Baldwin, which is just hard to take in. I've just been using it as a dictionary of sorts: I'm following the order of my chronological lists (Amis to Nabokov to O'Connor; Austen to Lord Byron to Wordsworth) when reading synopses and notes from Vade Mecum, and then I look up the texts in Smart Student's for any additional information, which will , of course, be tailored to what I'd need to know for the test. It'll also be helpful when I take my first practice exam tomorrow and review the answers.

It's only intense because I've been out of school for a couple of years and need to review a lot. I know that if I see a question and don't recognize a text, I'll panic and do much worse than I should. I don't remember where or even when I got these tests. I can link them to you, if no of a place to host PDFs. I have FORM GR9564, FORM GR0764 (the one on the ETS website), and FORM GR9964. I haven't looked at any of them, for obvious reasons, but I've just skimmed a smaller booklet of test questions that ETS was giving out in 1997 (I REALLY don't know where I got this one) and it's half identification, with some questions about interpretation and literary terms thrown in. It might be a case of people who take the test notice what they were least prepared for? Princeton Review says that identification is the strong majority of the test. I'm not worrying about any thing else, because "literary analysis" is a hard thing to study for.

I'm taking the September date, too. God speed. I've just started studying this month as well. What I've done is collect a list of about 650 texts that could be on the text. I used Cracking the GRE, an old Geocities site that counted text frequency, and the suggested reading list from USCB. Right now, I'm tackling the list chronologically--reading author notes in the Norton, reading synopses of the novels and longer poems, reading information off of Vade Mecum GRE and (to a much lesser extent) Hapaxlegomena, reading the shorter poems, reading, reading, reading. So I started in the 1700s BCE with the Gilgamesh epic and am now in 1928. Then I'll go through my notes again, focusing on the key texts (Cracking's A, B, and C lists; high frequency texts on the Geocities). At the same time, I've used my favorite online flashcard website Memrise to create the index cards. With those, I'm basically rotely memorizing text authors and character names. Learning character names is an easy way to identify passages, and it also really helps me remember plots. I have a few of the past tests from ETS. I want to do at least two, one in a week, one in about three weeks, so that I can be really comfortable with the test. I've never taken anything like it. Also reminding myself that the GRE is the part of the application professors care the least about.