Improve verbal scores

[Mat03]

Hi, I am exactly two weeks away from my GMAT exam and I just took the Princeton Test and scored very low on the verbal section (and thus overall). I ended up with a 27 in verbal. When I reviewed my mistakes I realised that I got 9 out of 13 RC questions wrong! I have always put off working on RC since it's so tedious, but with 2 weeks to go, I really wish to learn some quick strategies to improve in RC. Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Bill@VeritasPrep]

The biggest thing that seems to help most GMAT takers get better at RC is to realize that most of the details in the passage will never be directly tested in the questions. On our first readthrough, we should focus on the universal themes: the topic being discussed, the author's feelings, and the author's purpose for writing the passage. These make up the basis of many questions (you're pretty much guaranteed to see at least a couple "the primary purpose of the passage is to..." or similar), and they allow us to go back and pick out the details we need when a question makes a specific reference.