For many grad school applicants, earning an impressive GRE Verbal score is essential for gaining acceptance to their target programs, but figuring out how to achieve that score can be an overwhelming task.

In this article, I’ll give you a framework for success as well as specific, highly effective strategies for mastering the GRE Verbal sections. Whether you’re just starting your Verbal study or you need to improve your score, this article will help.

First, let’s discuss one of the most important things about GRE Verbal that every test-taker needs to understand: it’s more than just a vocab test!


One of the most common and damaging misconceptions that test-takers have about GRE Verbal is that it simply tests your knowledge of the definitions of words. While it is true that you will need to learn the definitions of a large number of vocabulary words in order to do well on the GRE Verbal sections — I’ll discuss some specific strategies for learning GRE vocab later on — relying on vocab memorization alone is a flawed strategy for earning a high Verbal score.

The fact is, GRE Verbal is so much more than just a vocab test. After all, if given enough time, most people could probably memorize and recite the definitions of many words. So, if that were all it took to earn a top-notch Verbal score, more people would be doing it, right?

Just as GRE Quant tests not only your knowledge of math concepts, but also your logical reasoning skills, GRE Verbal tests more than just your knowledge of vocabulary. In order to score high in Verbal, you need to understand how specific words relate to specific concepts in GRE questions, how words convey tone, how sentence structure affects meaning, how sentences and paragraphs relate to one another, and so much more.

Furthermore, in order to perform well on the Verbal sections, you must master the process of arriving at correct answers. Doing so requires structured and highly focused practice in which you deeply analyze sentences and passages, and consider not just the meaning of words but the logic of what is being said.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can simply memorize a couple thousand vocabulary words and ace GRE Verbal. If you’ve already started down that road, you’ve probably noticed that you’re struggling with many medium and hard-level Verbal questions. So, let’s talk about how to right the ship — or if you’re just getting started, set sail.

GRE Verbal is so much more than just a vocab test.


One of the biggest mistakes GRE students make is immediately jumping into trying to solve practice questions with a timer going. If you are going to master GRE Verbal, you have to give yourself the time to perform the type of deep analysis of questions that I mentioned earlier. In other words, you need to learn how to answer GRE Verbal questions before you can learn how to answer them quickly.

With that in mind, it’s essential that when you start solving GRE Verbal practice questions, you do so untimed. In fact, I recommend to my students that, in the beginning of their GRE Verbal preparation, they don’t worry about the clock at all and instead focus solely on analyzing questions and finding right answers. This is painstaking but essential work, without which you’re unlikely to gain the skills you need to answer GRE Verbal questions both quickly and correctly.

Think of it this way: If you get a job in a field in which you are inexperienced, you probably won’t perform your duties as quickly as your more experienced colleagues will. However, rushing through the job simply to get it done wouldn’t make sense. Moreover, as you gained experience and mastered the skills you needed to do the job, you would naturally do tasks that used to take you a long time more quickly.

The same concept applies to mastering GRE Verbal. You have to learn to see exactly what is going on in Verbal passages and answer choices, and you probably won’t learn to do so by spending a few minutes on each question. You may find that in the earlier stages of your Verbal training, you need to spend up to 15 minutes on a single question, learning to see all of the things you need to see to find a correct answer. Don’t be discouraged by the amount of time you need to answer Verbal questions when you’re just starting out. You are doing exactly what is necessary to drive up your score, and with every question, you’re strengthening your skills.

To get a better understanding of why untimed practice is so important, let’s discuss some of the things you should be looking for and doing during this practice.


Whether you’re reading a multi-paragraph Reading Comprehension passage or a Text Completion passage that is just a few sentences long, it’s always good practice to identify key aspects of what you’re reading.

For example, let’s say you’re faced with a Text Completion question composed of two sentences, with a blank in each sentence. How do the two sentences relate to each other? Do they convey a contrast? Agree with each other? Or let’s say you’re looking at a longer TC question, one composed of three or four rather lengthy sentences and containing three blanks. Is the author building a case? Does each successive sentence build on the previous one, adding supporting evidence or expressing an opinion? Does the author make an opinionated statement, and then back it up with an example? Or contradict a belief that others hold?

Noticing when these things occur and exactly where they occur in a GRE Verbal question is only going to help you find correct answers. This applies to Verbal questions that are just one sentence long as well. For instance, if you don’t notice that the first part of a Sentence Equivalence sentence contrasts with the second part of that sentence, you’re liable to fall for a trap and pick answers that are the exact opposite of what you need.

Of course, identifying key aspects of passages is also a significant aspect of the work you’ll need to do to master Reading Comprehension questions. RC questions will ask you to do things like assess the author’s tone, strengthen or weaken an argument, find assumptions, identify the main point of the passage and the supporting points, draw inferences and conclusions, resolve paradoxes, examine the structure of passages and the function of specific words, and more. So, in order to hone those skills, you need to spend time doing those things when you are answering practice questions. Obviously, performing that kind of detailed analysis won’t be possible if you’re trying to answer RC questions in just a few minutes each.

The same goes for Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions. If, when you’re just starting out, you try to answer those questions in 1.5 minutes, or a minute or less, etc., you’re not going to have time to practice pinpointing the key aspects of sentences that, once you’ve learned how to recognize them, act like neon signs alerting you to the correct answers. Remember, as you practice this skill, it will become like second nature to you, and you’ll be able to efficiently notice key pieces of information and answer questions more quickly.

Even if you’re already a ways into your GRE Verbal prep, but perhaps your progress has stalled or you’re finding it difficult to answer practice questions in the allotted time, ask yourself: Have I ever really taken the time to deconstruct passages and sentences, and notice exactly where important information appears? If the answer is no, you may need to backtrack a little and do this necessary work with some practice questions — no timer allowed!


Just as you must spend time analyzing passages for clues that will lead you to right answers, you should spend time analyzing answer choices if you want to become better (and faster) at eliminating wrong ones. This analysis is important because, as you will notice, there tend to be patterns in answer choices to GRE Verbal questions.

In other words, the GRE has certain traps and tricks it likes to employ in order to get test-takers to choose wrong answers, and the more you analyze answer choices, the more you’ll pick up on “recurring themes” in how the GRE is trying to trick you. This is true across all types of GRE Verbal questions.

For instance, you’ll notice that, often in Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions, the answer choices will present antonyms of the word(s) you need. So, when deciding between answer choices, it’s helpful to notice whether any choices have opposite meanings. Doing so will allow you to quickly eliminate any choices that go in the opposite direction of a plausible choice. Of course, the fact that two choices are opposites does not mean that you can assume that one of them will be the correct answer. The point is that, if a choice seems plausible and you identify other choices that are (or nearly are) its antonyms, you’ll be able to narrow down your remaining choices.

Another common trap that you may notice is that RC answer choices often will say something that is true in the real world (or sounds very likely to be true) but does not answer the question being asked or is not really related to what is said in the passage. It’s easy to fall for this kind of trap because the information is correct; it’s just not the information you need.

Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions employ a similar trick by evoking “real-world” scenarios in answer choices. For instance, a sentence describing some research that was performed may be followed by answer choices that include “comprehensive” and “meticulous,” both words that are frequently used in real life to describe “research.” Of course, those adjectives may have nothing to do with what is actually being depicted in the sentence. As with the “true but irrelevant” answer trap in RC questions, test-takers may be drawn to “real-world” answer choices in TC and SE questions because they pair words and concepts that people naturally associate. However, if you identify that GRE Verbal questions use this trap, you can stop yourself from falling into it.

So, being able to recognize the types of trap answer choices that repeatedly appear in GRE Verbal questions is a very useful skill. As you analyze more and more practice questions and answer choices, you’ll notice more of these traps. It may make sense for you to keep a list of the common trap choices you notice in Verbal questions, and briefly note how they try to trick you. For instance, your list might include “partially correct” as one type of RC trap, and then the description “answers only part of the question or is only partially true.” This list shouldn’t be too long, but it’s a good way for you to process what you’re seeing in GRE Verbal questions as you’re doing your untimed practice, so you can be aware of what to look out for going forward. Again, as you continue to identify recurring trap answers, quickly noticing them will become second nature.


An important thing to keep in mind when evaluating answer choices, and a theme you’ll notice running throughout this article, is that context really matters. For instance, if you rely on the definitions of words alone when answering Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions, you will undoubtedly end up with multiple answer choices that could make sense in the blanks. Take the “real-world” trap I just discussed: is the research “comprehensive,” “meticulous,” or some other descriptor? You’ll need to examine the sentence or sentences as a whole in order to determine what word is appropriate for the given context.

Likewise, in RC, if you only skim a passage looking for words related to the question stem, never bothering to read the entire passage, you run the risk of missing key pieces of information and falling for a trap answer. Furthermore, if an RC question asks you about the purpose of a specific word within a passage, you need to consider not just what that particular word means but how the word is being used in that particular context, because words have multiple meanings and can be used in multiple ways.

This brings us back to my initial point that GRE Verbal is more than just a test of your vocabulary knowledge. In fact, if you have a good understanding of the context that surrounds a word that must be defined or a blank requiring a word, you sometimes can find the correct answer to a GRE Verbal question without knowing the precise definitions of all of the words in question. Even if you know the definitions of only some of the words, or you have only vague notions of the definitions of the words, the context will provide you with clues that will help you narrow down your choices.

Keep in mind that one way that the GRE makes Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions more difficult is by putting tricky vocab words in the sentences themselves, as opposed to just in the answer choices. However, you can probably get a pretty good grasp of what a sentence is saying without knowing the exact definition of every single word in the sentence.

The same holds true for RC passages. You may frequently come across RC passages that cover subjects in which you’re not well-versed and use terminology that is unfamiliar to you. Nevertheless, if you can basically understand what is presented and pick up on those key aspects I discussed earlier — the tone of what is being said, the basic scenario described or argument laid out, what the main point and conclusion are, any contrasts or evidence presented — then you don’t really need to know the exact definition of every single word in the passage, and depending on the subject matter, you probably can’t expect to.