The 800 Verbal Walkthrough
This article seeks to arm you with tools and strategies for conquering the verbal section of the GRE, it does however make some assumptions which are best noted right upfront. It is assumed that your GRE test is at least six months away and that for the period between now and the planned test date you will eat (used here as a superlative of by heart) a fixed amount of words without fail daily. This second assumption must be carefully noted as the GRE verbal is unlike most of the other exams you have taken so far, last minute cramming will not help at all. Vocabulary building is a gradual process. Finally take the GRE only if you are all for it, don’t take the GRE just because your dad (after hearing Mr. Iyer’s son maxed the GRE) thinks you should take it. A half hearted attempt will only disappoint you. Before we get to the real stuff, here is a quick disclaimer: all of the tips and tricks presented below are based on my experience, there is no statistical evidence establishing the effectiveness of these methods, hence use your discretion in deciding how well a particular method of attack suits you.
Your success in the verbal section of the GRE depends to a great extent on your vocabulary. Expect to run through your word list at least four comprehensive times. Get yourself a set of flash cards and start eating words, eat them in the bus, train, in free lectures etc. You can start at around 40 words per day, then move on to around 75 words per day. Start looking for words outside the flash cards, in editorials, in magazines and even in your non-Katre textbooks!! Anywhere you see a word you don’t know, hunt it down, get to its meaning, a word learnt like this will never slip out of your memory. Don’t restrict word learning to flash cards, if you have the time go through books like Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy. People have this unfounded notion that the set of flash cards they have managed to lay their hands on contains all the words they can ever encounter on the GRE. This is absolutely untrue!! While most of the words will figure in the flash cards, be very prepared to expect words not on flash cards. So much said and done let’s look at some good ways to eat words.
You are not going to remember a word if you just look at it once or twice, that isn’t going to work. As was mentioned earlier, you need to go through the words again and again. In your first pass through the word-list your aim should be more towards getting acquainted with the words, form your first impression of the words, don’t look to by-heart the words in this pass. This first pass should not take you more than 45 days. Once you are done with this it is time to attack the words a bit more systematically. Get hold of the Oxford Talking Dictionary and/or the American heritage dictionary, the OTD has a very good thesaurus and the AHD has very good word definitions, however more importantly both these dictionaries have excellent notes on etymology (origin of words), you must use this feature to dissect every word on the word-list. In your second pass you must try to rationally understand why a word means what it means, e.g. the word moribund (which means dying) sounds very weird on the first read but a little bit of investigation (using any of the dictionaries mentioned above) will tell you that it comes from Latin word mori which means ‘to die’. You should be insightful enough to notice that the next few words on the list like mortician, mortify are related as they spring from the same root mori. Similarly say for instance you know anthropology means study of origin of human beings, when you read misanthrope (person who hates other humans) you should know that it is somehow anti-human, which is to be expected as anthropo- is the Greek root for human. Some words have interesting stories behind them for instance the word gerrymander (which means to divide a geographic area into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections.) came into being after E. Gerry the governor of Massachusetts reshaped the political boundaries of a district in his state to the advantage of his party in the upcoming elections, the new district boundaries made it look like a Salamander. So Gerry + Salamander = Gerrymander was born. These word origins; stories etc. make it easy to by-heart and relate words. In your second pass, you must attack each word with the sole aim of getting to the bottom of its story. Also it is scientifically proven that we are good at remembering images. Using the Google image search will easily return images for all material nouns (like cornucopia, awl, gavel etc.) sometimes it is possible to find caricatured or emoticon-like images for adjectives too, have a good look at the image and then think of the image every time you think of the word you related to it. Another good strategy (the Thesaurus in OTD is especially helpful for this) is to form lists of related words. Look up for entries corresponding to a word in the thesaurus and note down all the words that are similar in meaning to that word, it is important to limit yourself to the synonyms present on your GRE word list, or this process is way too exhaustive to be possible. Note down the shades of difference in meaning of all the related words that you have listed down and note the connotative usage of these words, This method of learning makes it very easy to attack analogy type questions on the GRE. You will discover your own ways to eat words as you run through the list. Whatever you do make the second pass as comprehensive as possible. You need at least two more revisions after the second pass and you must have to the very minimum more than a month and a half in hand for the third and fourth passes. In the third pass you have to cover more than 250 words a day, now is the time to get rid of the flash cards and pick up Barrons. As you progress through the word lists in Barrons, it is important to quickly revise the words you had done 3 to 4 days earlier before starting with new words. This revision is very helpful in so much that it is very quick and that words learned in this manner tend to stay in your head. The third pass should not take you more than twenty days, once you are through with it, it is time to shift gears.
Now you have a month or more in
your hand, it is a good time to start giving tests. The GRE Big Book is a godsend;
you should solve as many verbal tests given in it as you can. These tests
contain questions from the real GRE and are comparable in structure and
difficulty level to the actual GRE. If you do not have much time on hand, do
not solve all of the verbal tests in the big book. Instead solve the first ten,
analyze them, identify the problematic question types (a set that usually
includes Reading Comprehension by default) and solve only those parts of the
remaining verbal tests. When around 20 or so days are left you must start
taking computer adaptive tests. The
Finally, on the day of the test nothing counts more than your cool quotient; don’t let the test get to you. All the best !!