Acquiring New Vocabulary the Old-Fashioned Way – By Reading!

So, you are preparing yourself for the GRE and you need to add some egghead words to your prodigiousand more commonly utilized line-up of text-speak, pop culture jargon, and  4-letter expletives (hey, studying for the GRE can be stressful!) Certainly, you are aware that there are tools for such a task to be found on many websites – Kaplan, of course, includes in our course offerings many effective means to increase and enrich your vocabulary.

Additionally, reading novels and certain newspapers and magazines (the ones that don’t cater to a fifth-grade reading level – all apologies to USA Today and People magazine, which are just fine for their purpose of informing and entertaining) will aid you in realizing heretofore unexplored words. However, perhaps even better fodder for the acquisition of headier, grad-level words can be found by examining trade journals and works of non-fiction. Try delving into the dense prose that can readily be found in such word hordes as The Wall Street Journal or Architectural Digest.  Not into mergers and acquisitions?  Is the study of buttresses not to your liking?  Indeed, if you search with the slightest zest, you can locate a vocabulary-invigorating periodical that may actually speak to your own interests.

Moreover, since the New GRE Verbal section is known to traffic in questions concerning the logical analysis of arguments, your reading and appraising such content in political or economic publications, for instance, can’t help but serve you synchronous benefits.

Acquiring a rich and test-ready vocabulary via contextual clues found within the writing of an intelligent author rather than simply studying the dry drudgery of flashcards or daily list o’ words repetition is much more intuitive, organic, and heaven forbid, fun!

After all, The New GRE now limits its assessment of your word knowledge to sentence equivalence, text completions and words-in-context of reading comp passages.  Since the GRE has retired its tired format of testing words in a vacuum (antonyms and analogies), why not learn them in a similar manner to that in which they are tested?