The key to doing well on the verbal section is to sift through the seemingly dense verbiage and understand what the question is really asking or which core concept(s) is being tested. Easier said than done I know! So I'll quickly give you a couple tips.
1) Improve SPEED + COMPREHENSION by reading linearly. When you read, you are constantly linking entities. Let's read this example CR question that I quickly grabbed off the verbal forum so I could explain how you can improve.
Time and again it has been shown that students who attend colleges with low faculty/student ratios get the most well-rounded education. As a result, when my children are ready to attend college, I'll be sure they attend a school with a very small student population.
Which of the following, if true, identifies the greatest flaw in the reasoning above?
Some test-takers, like I did myself, read like this.. resulting in wasted time.. parentheses indicate what I'm thinking..
Time and again (Ok.. something about frequently) it has been (what has been?) shown (some study?) that students who attend colleges (study about college kids ah hah!) with low faculty/student ratios (hmm something about more attention students get?) get the most (comparing something? I guess with high faculty ratios? wait.. high ratio where again?).. colleges (yeah colleges with low faculty/student ratios.. that's it)
In this case, you're trying to link together a LARGE number of SMALL entities which can make it quite confusing. Instead, as this will only come with practice, try to read and group together larger entities, thus limiting the number of "links" you have to do in your head. The more you practice.. you'll be able to link phrases, not just a couple words.. sentences, not phrases... and eventually paragraphs, not sentences..
I know that not everyone faces this problem so it certainly may not apply to many of you. But to me, as a fairly strong Quant guy weak in verbal, something like this has significantly helped me.
2) For SC, my weakness was trying to test the concepts or rules for which the question wasn't even testing. For example, I'll go line by line each answer choice looking for S/V agreement errors to find out that all the S/V agreements were indeed correct. What can you take away from this? Learn the tells! Scan the answer choices and understand what the concept(s) is being tested. I might go against what test prep companies tell you by taking an active stance in solving GMAT problems but for just SC purposes, I take a passive approach and let the answer choices TELL me wtf is wrong.
Also, when eliminating close answer choices, apply the entity technique that I described above but this time, look at entities in terms of parts of speech and idioms and see how they piece together. Let's look at an example (from Max Morenberg's Doing Grammar) that I slightly modified.
"Unlike that of other countries, Japan must overcome serious obstacles in order to keep its economy in gear."
You know countries, japan, obstacles, economy, and gear are all the nouns. You're saying "great so what??"
This isn't enough and you shouldn't be looking at SC questions like this. It's better to look at them as larger entities. Notice the structure of the sentence and group them as entities THEN parse out what is necessary. You know every sentence must have a SUBJECT and a VERB. So with practice, you should be able to visualize the "larger" entities.
Prepositional Phrase, Subject Noun - Main Verb - Direct Object Noun - Adverbial phrase (indicating reason).
What do I know now? Seems like a perfectly structured sentence. I know that prepositional phrases and adverbial phrases are flexible so they could go anywhereWell.. I know that the adverbial phrase is using a pronoun so that a prepositional phrase (showing comparison) when used in the beginning of the sentence should logically compare with the noun that comes after it. not finished.. wifes calling me ill get back to this tomorrow.
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