First off, EXCELLENT Quant scores! You are well on your way to a 760 if you can just balance out the Verbal Portion. In regards to Verbal there are several nuances that people take for granted when studying. It is important for me to mention that depending on the specific area that you are not performing well they require different approaches to mend.
Critical Reasoning:
For some students this may be one of the hardest sections in the beginning because they are not use to the question type and the specifics that the questions are asking, however the section also tends to be one of the easiest to get better at. When I say get better I mean getting more than 80% correct on average even when doing the medium hard to hard questions. If this is a section that you really do not understand I would pick up a critical reasoning book (from any company but preferably Logic Reasoning Bible) thumb through the book and just keep on practicing it. After a while I would categorize CR questions really into two categories the manageable and the ridiculously crazy type. Don't worry not answering the ridiculously hard questions correctly will not hurt you as long as you are getting the rest right. So the take away? Don't make any stupid mistakes. Study it, practice, practice, and practice!
Sentence Correction:
Sentence correction is a matter of KNOWING the RULES! if you don't know the Rules you can't get the questions right. But don't worry there are not that many rules you need to know and there are some big ones that reappear again and again. (ex: modifiers, parallelism, verb agreement, pronoun agreement) As the questions get harder you will notice there are usually 2 or more grammatical errors in a single sentence. Think of this as a gift because sometimes spotting an error in a sentence containing only one error can be hell. For example The dinosaur egg is estimated .... 5 million years old. Is the idiom "to be"? or is it "at"? or is it neither? See where I am getting at? Notice this comes down to an issue of idioms, and idiom errors are extremely hard to decipher and having another grammatical error like Subject verb agreement will help you eliminate some extra choices. Unfortunately the only way you can get good at these questions is by learning the RULES first and then start practicing with questions with specific grammar errors. For example: Study Subject verb agreement. Do 20 questions that have subject verb agreement error. Move on to next topic. Truth be hold, SC usually takes a good month or two to master but without it you can't score high on the verbal section.
Reading Comp:
To many people studying the GMAT Reading Comp may be the section that is least paid attention to. After all everything is in the passage right? True, but the trick here is developing the mental stamina to be able to concentrate on these passages after an hour of writing and another of math. God forbid a woman suffrage passage pops up or a literary excerpt. You may smash the monitor. So how do you deal with this? At the end of every study session make yourself sit down and do 4 RC passages. This will help you build up the mental concentration that is needed! In addition, please pretend you care about the passage amazing how the mind can just block things out when you don't care. Let me just give you a little example, after learning and practicing all of the grammar rules needed for sentence correction I finally was doing practice test after practice test. Again and again my verbal scores were not what I wanted. Furthermore, i realized that I was getting a significantly more questions correct on the SC. What was going on? I looked at my breakdown and noticed the culprit. It was READING COMP. The percentages were everywhere. Sometimes I did good sometimes I did horrible. All of this correlated to how tired my brain was and how much I cared about the passage. For you to score above a 40 the reading comp questions you are going to get are pretty tough. They are going to be inferences, author's perspective, and general ideas. Questions you can only answer if you understood the passage as a whole not if you understood each paragraph. So remember, 4 passages end of every study session. Start with 2 or 3 in the beginning if you are new at it but build up.
Good luck!
PS I believe 42 is somewhere in the 95% percentile in verbal. Expect some of the hardest questions from each of the topics in verbal. Therefore, you really can't have any weak links in verbal.
