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.