preparing for the verbal GRE

cosmicfish
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:21:49 +0000

dfh has some good suggestions, but I would expand on one: READ. Most people read very little challenging material, if they read with any frequency at all. Whether it is the publications he listed or something else, make it a point to find challenging reading. It should be something interesting or entertaining so that it holds your interest, and it should be difficult enough that you frequently encounter words you do not know.

The great thing about reading is that it gives you the words in context, often repeatedly, rather than as memorization assignments. Outside of a lot of reading, my entire preparation for the GRE consisted of taking half a practice exam the day before, and I pulled a 720 on the verbal.

Still do the lists and word-a-day type stuff as well, by the way - there are a lot of GRE words that appear on the test and just about nowhere else in the english language.