Learn to Create Your Own GMAT Verbal Explanations

As you’re preparing for the Verbal section, you’ll read many answer explanations, and reading explanations can be helpful. However, reading other people’s explanations for the Verbal questions you see will get you only so far.

In fact, I’ve seen GMAT students read literally hundreds of explanations without achieving increases in their Verbal section scores. Why? Because every Verbal question is different. So, you could carefully study many explanations and not master GMAT Verbal because you’ll see new questions to which the explanations you’ve studied don’t apply.

So, to really master GMAT Verbal, you have to learn to create your own explanations. In fact, in preparing for GMAT Verbal, your goal is essentially to learn to explain Verbal questions choice by choice. After all, to get Verbal questions correct consistently, you need to be able to articulate exactly why each choice in a question is incorrect or correct.

So, don’t be satisfied if you get Verbal questions correct but are not able to fully explain what is going on in them. Work on learning to explain Verbal questions as an expert would. Some students even type up thorough explanations for practice questions.

To learn to create your own explanations, read every component of each question carefully, and ask questions such as the following:

• What do I need to see to get this question correct?
• Why exactly is this choice incorrect?
• What exactly is the effect of this choice?

Then, using your concept knowledge, what you’ve learned from explanations, and careful choice-by-choice analysis, explain all the key aspects of the question.

By learning to fully explain questions, you’ll position yourself to rock GMAT Verbal on test day.

Key takeaway: To master GMAT Verbal, learn to explain Verbal questions choice by choice, as an expert would.

Warmest regards,
Scott