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.


A great — and often overlooked — way to get accustomed to the style and subject matter of GRE Reading Comprehension passages as well as Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions is to regularly read high-quality newspapers and magazines such as The Economist, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In those publications, you will encounter sophisticated writing from a variety of perspectives and in different tones, much like in GRE Verbal. Those publications (and others like them) also cover a broad range of topics in the biological, physical, and social sciences, politics, the arts, and the humanities, and of general interest, just like GRE Verbal does.

The more exposure you have to GRE-type written material, the more comfortable you’ll feel when you see the real thing. Perhaps you already read some GRE-type articles every so often. Make reading them a daily habit. Maybe you read one of the newspapers I mentioned on a regular basis; why not add a couple of magazines into the mix?

In addition to getting you more comfortable with the style and content of GRE Verbal passages, reading high-quality publications is a fantastic way to broaden your vocabulary. As I’ll discuss next, learning a large volume of vocabulary words is an unavoidable part of preparing for GRE Verbal. When you read high-quality publications, you give yourself more opportunities to see the vocab words you’re learning used in different contexts, and thus gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of their meanings. Moreover, you may encounter additional words you don’t know, including words that might not be on your vocab study list but could appear on the GRE. If you look up those unfamiliar words as you encounter them, you likely will add substantially to your vocabulary knowledge base.

You can also practice identifying the key elements I discussed earlier in newspaper and magazine articles, just as you will in GRE passages. What is the tone of the article you’re reading? Is the author advancing an argument or offering an opposing view to an existing one? What conclusion does the author reach? Does the author make any assumptions, provide evidence to support claims, explain a cause-and-effect scenario, or describe a process or historical event?

Don’t underestimate the power of reading widely from high-quality sources in helping you prepare to tackle GRE Verbal questions. Not all of this reading has to be structured or goal-oriented in the ways I mentioned above (although I do recommend always looking up a word if you don’t know its meaning). The point is to make a habit of reading reputable publications in order to better prepare yourself for the rigorous written material you’ll see on the GRE. After a while, you may be surprised at how much more confident you feel when faced with the long, thorny GRE passages that test-takers tend to dread.


GRE students sometimes make the mistake of thinking that learning the materialand completing a ton of GRE Verbal Reasoning practice questions is enough to ace the GRE Verbal sections. What they don’t realize is that one-third of the puzzle that is their GRE preparation is missing.

If you are not analyzing every question you answer incorrectly to figure out where you went wrong, you are not getting the full benefit of your GRE Verbal practice. This is true when doing either practice sets or practice tests. You must return to the questions you got wrong, pinpoint the specific mistake you made, and either do the necessary content review or behavior correction to ensure that you don’t make that same mistake in the future.

If you don’t perform this necessary work, you’re likely to commit the same errors over and over again, or you may overlook gaps in your knowledge and skills that will come back to bite you on test day.

So, don’t just note how many questions you got wrong in a practice set or on a practice test, or what types of GRE Verbal questions you got wrong. Revisit each missed question and try to identify whatever errors you made. Did you misread the passage? Were you rushing and reading too quickly? Did you make a careless mistake or forget the definition of a word? Did you misidentify the conclusion or assumption in a passage? Did you gloss over an important detail in a sentence? The more precise you can be when analyzing your mistakes, the better you’ll be able to find your exact weaknesses and strengthen them.

Happy Studying! ⏰