logitech wrote:karenleslie wrote:I don't know if I can help anyone on the verbal section, but I'd love to try! what do people find difficult?
Ah Karen...where should we start from
God Bless you!
Oh, He does, logitech, indeed He does!
In fact, I did a LOT of praying that morning, maybe that's what did it
I'm surprised that RC is a sticking point, I breathed a sigh of relief when those passages came up! They seem less ambiguous on to me than CR, and less debatable that SC (of the four I got wrong on the practice test, none were RC, and most I understood, but there was an SC I'd still argue my side of
I try to take Kaplan's advice and read the question on the right side first ( I usually forget and end up doing that after I read the intro.) While studying, I would sometimes scan the stimulus, but the test sufficiently freaked me out, so I made sure to read the whole thing. I'd read each question and quickly think up some satisfactory answers in my head before reading the options. I wrote the letters ABCDE on my funky laminated paper thing once, and on tougher questions I'd go through and cross out the ones I knew were wrong, putting dashes next to the possibilities. (I didn't bother rewriting the letters for each question, it just helped me to get an idea of which options I was ignoring, it could get overwhelming on tougher ones to try to eliminate in my head for some reason.) If there was nothing in there that matched what I'd pre-formulated, I went back and read the sentence in question and the surrounding two. Twice I realized I'd misunderstood the passage, which was disconcerting, but the fact that there were no answers close to mine alerted me to that fact and prompted me to reread the passage, paying closer attention. I realized while I was testing that I kept a sort of running summary of the passage (it's thesis and evidence, how it related points to one another, and any turns it made with words like "however") as I read in my own words, which helped greatly with pre-formulating and with selecting and eliminating answer choices on intuition.
English is my first language and first love (I was an english major until I realized that i couldn't get a job doing anything but teaching, at which I would be worse than lousy!) I was the kid who read for fun and snuck a flashlight under the covers
That's to say I likely am strong in reading comprehension not because I'm brilliant (ha!) but because I'm a dork!
SC was second easiest--I'd read the sentence briefly consider any obvious flaws. If I found any wordiness, tense disagreement, or screwed up idioms, I'd look through the answer choices first to find the ones that corrected that problem, then compare those options and pick out the differences. That's probably where I saved a lot of time, I didn't have to read all the answer choices that way. If I didn't see anything glaringly wrong, I'd start reading B, and as soon as I encountered something I didn't like, I moved on. If I got all the way through the answer choices without finding one that i liked better than the first one, I picked A. I guess I almost looked at it like I was grading my little brother's essay and had to pick the wording I liked best, instead of what are the rules for this, that and the other thing and which of these options follows which of the rules best, blah, blah, blah.
CR were the tougher ones because I've never taken a test with those in it. (I want my analogies back!!) I don't know that my advice would be very helpful on those, the ones I got wrong on the practice test were mostly CR. I pre-formulated for those, too, and tried to read the question before the stimulus.
Hope that helps!!
