canberra

Even if the author is wrong in how he's re-worked the sentence, he's broken it down into shorter chunks, something you've agreed with. I'm sure you would do a better job of reworking the sentence and writing it more clearly. If the GRE passages are written more clearly, they'll be easier to comprehend, which in turn means that the test-takers' scores currently cannot entirely be a reflection of ONLY their reading comprehension ability. Comprehension naturally depends on how clear the writing is too.

Make sure the LORs refer to actual work/projects you have done. Bland statements such as, "S/he is proactive and takes initiatives" are useless compared to a statement such as, "When confronted with such-and-such a problem, s/he did such-and-such a thing without being told."

It is not a passage but a single sentence! But it is so long that you mistook it for a passage, which kind of proves the point. I think the author's already done a good enough job of re-working the sentence: In the 20th century, more married women had jobs because they needed the money – not just because domestic appliances freed up their time. Also, employers used to only hire single women, but their supply was cut by high marriage rates.

The sentence below from the GRE sample passage is not a definition, but I would hardly say it is written with any degree of precision. The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.

If you can prove your overwhelming commitment in your desired subject areas (eg work, internships etc), that can help a lot.

There's no law that says academic reading material has to be dry. Universities are places of learning, where we explore new and exciting things. It's the faculty who don't feel the excitement, who write in a dry manner.

You're absolutely right. You should be putting in effort to interpret the research, not the scholar’s writing.

The bigger issue is whether smoking outside (ie in a public place) is permitted in the country in which you are taking the test.

Well, if all the answer choices were guilty of some degree of misrepresentation or oversimplification, obviously even the correct answer was badly written too. The writing should be should be so clear that you should not have to guess. Further you should be thinking about what the author of a passage wants you to understand, rather than what the test-maker thinks you should understand . If there's a difference between what the author says, and what the test-maker thinks the author is saying, then clearly there''s a problem. Unless the author is the one vetting his own passage questions/answers when the test is being created, we have no way of knowing whether the test-maker is in synch with what the author is saying in the passage. That's the problem with percentile based tests. To make the test supremely difficult, you could just have one long and complex passage comprising a single sentence, containing multiple strands of thought with no punctuation marks. There certainly will be a few people who will succeed in this test. Does this mean everybody else can't read and comprehend as well? The aim of scholars should be for them to have their ideas and theories contested and debated. There should be no confusion about what they're saying but the reality is that there is confusion. Instead of arguing about the ideas, in the passages we argue about "did the scholar mean this, or did the scholar mean that?"

Your line actually explains the point of the passage far better, and enables the reader to comprehend far more quickly! The explanation of Salmonella etc can follow, but in essence, your sentence is really what the passage is about. And your use of "once upon a time" means that it's definitely not boring. It's not 'scholarly writing' but it gets the point across in a fun way. What's the problem? I would bet that far more people would understand your line in a few seconds, compared to muddling through the GRE passage wondering what on earth the main point is.

Why use the word 'genus' at all then? There seems to be absolutely no editing that happens with these passages. The debate apart, the premise of the 'flawed GRE' article is that the reader's ability to comprehend partly depends on the quality of writing. I really, really, really don't see anything wrong with that.

Use Google Chrome as your browser, and then add-on the dictionary extension. When you come across a word you don't know, you just have to highlight the word and click on the dictionary icon in the URL window, and you get the meaning. That way, you will also learn words while surfing the web.

You may find the passages easy to follow but the reality is that many people find them very difficult. This means the fault lies with the writer, not just with the readers. Moreover, I would hardly say the following sentence maximizes information with minimum amount of text. “The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.” The question isn't whether something has a place in scholarly writing or not. The question is, does the writing help make life easier for the reader? If bold, underline etc help the reader, why should they not be used? Who made up the rules that scholarly writing should be not include the use of wordprocessing features (bold, italics etc)? Why can't we question these rules, given that they seem to come from ancient times when scholars didn't have computers? The only reason I can think of is insecurity. 'Scholars' don't want others to think that because their writing is easy to understand, the scholar is really not very intelligent. If a headline helps make life easier for the reader, why not?

I don’t think you saw this example of GRE ‘scholarly literature’ quoted in the article, because I can’t believe you’d defend a sentence like this one: “The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.” Far from ‘scholarly writing’, this is the writing of a person who hasn’t attended a high school class on punctuation. And for argument’s sake, let’s say convoluted and dense writing styles are ok. But as the author says, why can’t academic writing (including the GRE passages) make use of wordprocessing features like bold, italics, underline, bullet points, and so on? These things make life easier for the reader and are widely used now because of computers, which were not widely available in earlier times. What about headlines, which all ‘scholarly literature’ articles have? Also you mention that “In the world we live in, scholarly literature is dense and convoluted in style”. But this doesn’t mean the world cannot and should not change. Just because earlier generations wrote densely, this doesn’t mean we should continue doing the same. In the olden days, language such as thine, thee and so on were used. We don’t use language like that anymore. Times change; language cannot remain a prisoner of the past, or a prisoner of lazy and arrogant ‘scholars’ who can’t be bothered to make their writing accessible.

Don't try to do too many things at the same time, it will confuse you and the evaluator as well. Keep it simple, that's the philosophy, that way clarity will be maintained.