mbrown10012 wrote:I have over a year to prepare for my Gmat's and I want to get a head start. My verbal is really weak and I want to develop a good foundation before tackling the practice test itself. For a person that is trying to develop a strong foundation for Gmats, what are my choices? Thank you
this is a very broad question, so i'll give you the basics, and you can post back if you want more specific information.
the verbal section, as you probably know, has three different departments -- sentence correction, critical reasoning, and reading comprehension. each of these has a particular skill set, and so the preparation for each is going to be completely different. moreover, you are probably going to have differing levels of aptitude at the three departments, so the level of initial preparation that you should do for each will very accordingly.
in general, sentence correction is the most randomly specialized of the three.
by "randomly specialized", i mean that english is a vast web of grammatical and usage-related rules, only a small fraction of which are actually used in the gmat sentence correction problems; therefore, if you study grammar from a general scholastic source, you will probably wind up wasting a great deal of time on topics that are not actually covered on the test.
therefore, if you study sentence correction, it is absolutely essential that you get a gmat-specific source for your sentence correction information. for instance, the mgmat sentence correction manual breaks english grammar and usage down to those topics that are covered on the test, omitting topics that, while important in the overall grammar of the language, aren't tested.
for critical reasoning, you may find it helpful to pick up a basic primer on arguments and logic, if you are totally unfamiliar with the structure of a basic logical argument. i'm not talking about anything fancy, such as a college philosophy textbook; rather, any basic critical thinking manual will do.
there are many critical thinking textbooks actually aimed at high school students; one of those may be your best bet for a friendly introduction to the topic.
as for reading comprehension, this skill set is probably more natural than the other two. if you don't want to use up your precious cache of the official reading comp materials, you may want to start out by selecting scholarly articles from random journals and seeing whether you can read through them at a fairly accelerated pace while still retaining some sort of notion of the main idea.
ironically, you may get better practice for reading journal articles in subjects with which you are completely unfamiliar. this way, you can focus on absorbing the main idea of the article within a short time, even if you don't understand much of the detail in the passage at all. (this is actually the model you'll follow when you do real reading passages -- you gloss over the details, concentrating only on the main ideas as you progress through the passage.)
ironically, leading passages about material with which you are already familiar, or in which you are already interested, may actually reinforce exactly the wrong qualities -- most particularly, a propensity to focus on details to the exclusion of the big picture. if you stick to reading material that you don't understand that well, you won't be able to focus on the details -- because you simply won't understand all of them -- and so you'll be forced to develop a better facility with reading for the main idea.
