<p>I heard that a lot of people just get better at the two from reading and analyzing books. Have you heard of this to be true. If so, any books you would recommend?</p>
<p>Enough to bring from 600’s to 700’s in month and 1/2.</p>
<p>Any help? I heard Grapes of Wrath will help.</p>
<p>It’s not specifically what you read; it’s HOW you read. It’s a habit and a skill you develop over time. The best book you could read in such a short time is an old one, “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler. While you read about learning to read like an adult, also underline the vocab words you don’t know and learn what they mean.</p>
<p>grammar is more formulaic, so for writing just do practice tests and study the solution explanations. for critical reading, yeah, read more</p>
<p>Jane Austen</p>
<p>Reading books with the specific intention of improving your SAT scores is an endeavor as misguided as it is fruitless. The CR and W sections of the SAT can be conquered in one of two ways: by taking practice tests and familiarizing yourself with the mechanics and objectives of the SAT, or by having a natural aptitude for the things the test is supposed to measure. The former results not from reading Grapes of Wrath with the SAT in mind, but from being a good critical thinker–of which doing well on standardized tests is only a side benefit.</p>
<p>If your current critical thinking skills are insufficiently developed to get you the CR score you want (or developed in ways the SAT doesn’t measure), do not think you can improve them in the span of six weeks. Yes, it is always a good idea to read more books, but a six-week reading marathon will neither raise your score greatly nor benefit you in more intangible ways, unless you undertake it for your own pleasure.</p>
<p>What I’m trying to say is that there are two types of people who do well on the CR section: people who have prepared well, and people who don’t need preparation. By asking whether reading books will help you, you’re basically asking whether you can become someone who doesn’t need preparation for the SAT. The answer is no, in six weeks you can’t. Becoming a discerning reader takes years of reading, not weeks, and is an end in itself, not a means.</p>
<p>What you can do is take practice tests and analyze your performance on them (but choose a prep book that elaborates on the correct answers and explains why the wrong answers are wrong). The more tests you take, the better at not making mistakes you’ll become.</p>
<p>So. Practice, practice, practice. This is what you should do. Reading a famous novel that you don’t care about will not magically reveal the secrets of text analysis to you, but understanding your mistakes just might (at least for the purposes of the SAT). You don’t need to be an avid reader to learn to recognize the test-makers’ logic.</p>
<p>For the record, I have 800 on the CR and W sections of the SAT, as well as 800 on the Literature subject test–all achieved without studying. I’m not saying this to boast; I’m quite woeful at math and don’t know the first thing about science, so I have little room to talk. I’m saying it to substantiate my claim that there are people who don’t need preparation for certain sections of the SAT, and that their high performance is merely a by-product of their aptitude for other stuff. Being awful at math, I am familiar with the other side of the story as well and can attest that when you don’t have that natural/hard-earned aptitude, preparing for the test itself yields better results than trying to become really good at what the SAT is only superficially assessing.</p>
<p>That being said, Grapes of Wrath is a great book and I second the recommendation.</p>
<p>If you are not a natural at the critical reading (I’m not; I started from a 60 CR on last year’s PSAT and improved to an 800 CR on the October 9 SAT) then you should just practice with the tests and you will be able to raise your score from the 600’s to the 700’s.</p>
<p>If you want, I have written a guide on the critical reading section. The link is below.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/1024138-how-i-got-800-sat-critical-reading-story-guide.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/1024138-how-i-got-800-sat-critical-reading-story-guide.html</a></p>
<p>Just so you know, English has not been a strong suit of mine, so my advice below is pretty much what I did to improve my scores from 600’s up to high 700’s-800 (and hopefully two more 800’s in 10 days).</p>
<p>Reading books to improve CR/W scores is likely to fail. To bolster your vocabulary skills, memorize the words in both volumes of Direct Hits; those books saved my ass on the PSAT and SAT (how is an average person supposed to know the definitions of “apocryphal” or “prescience?”).</p>
<p>As for writing, just learn your grammar rules. Improper comparison, Subject-verb agreement, Pronoun-Antecedent agreement, etc. When you read informal writing (CC posts to blogs) and talk with your friends, make mental notes of any grammar errors (“If there was” should be “If there were”). For your essay, I recommend spending <1 minute planning and the rest of the time furiously writing so as not to leave ANY blank space.</p>
<p>For the CR passages, I’ve found that the Grammatix method (at least, I think this is the Grammatix method; I’m not the best with the different names on this site) really, really works. In the past (i.e. freshman year up through sophomore PSAT), I’ve read through the passages before ever looking through the questions. By the time I finished, I would have to go back and pretty much re-read while answering at the same time because I’d have forgotten what I had just read. What I do now is bracket/circle the line references in all the questions and answer as I go. You will rarely, if ever, need to go past line 14 for a question that references line 13. If you mark up your passage, you’ll know when to stop and read/answer a question. This saves time and should increase your scores.</p>