Think of it this way: the test makers aren’t your friend. They’re not trying to help you out. So they’re not just going to write random wrong answer choices; they’re going to write wrong answers that will influence your thinking. Don’t fall in for that nonsense.

Here’s a relatively easy problem that turns ugly if you look at the choices too soon:

The Leonidas Achievement Award, though ostensibly prestigious, is held in low repute by some scholars who claim that favoritism runs rampant and that the judges are ______.

A) Partisan

B) Incompetent

C) Immoral

D) Stupid

E) Ugly. Like, really, really ugly.

Did you read the choices before solving the problem? You need to break that habit. Focus on the sentence: the judges are [blank], and the only clue you’ve got is that “favoritism runs rampant.” So, you need a word that indicates that the judges are not fair. Now look at the choices: even if you don’t know that partisan means “partial to a specific person,” you can confidently pick it because none of the other words mean “unfair.” Easy problem. Ba-da boom, ba-da done.

If you look at the choices first, though, the story is much uglier. You could argue that the role of a judge is to be impartial, so a judge who plays favorites is bad at her job (B, incompetent). You could argue that people trust judges to be objective, and a judge who betrays that trust is a bad person (C, immoral) or foolish for attaining such a noble responsibility and then shirking it (D, stupid). You could even argue that the judges are ugly, like really really ugly (on the inside).

In short, you could argue a lot of things. And as I wrote last year, any time you find yourself arguing with the GRE, you’re wrong. Look at it this way: either you’re wrong, or the person who literally makes a living writing the test — and can probably score double 170′s in her sleep — is wrong. Let your competition waste their time arguing with the GRE; you have an ego to put aside and points to score.

On the verbal section, that means you need to stop being creative and start using the clues the test makers give you. Don’t argue: use. The sentence says the judges were unfair. So the right answer has to mean “unfair.” Ba-da boom. Ba-da done.

The Kaplan New GRE Verbal Workbook includes a chapter devoted to Reading Comprehension, as well as sets of practice questions and additional resources. One of these resources is a list of additional tips for tackling the Reading Comprehension section, including Bolded Statements questions. These tips are found on pages 78-80, and I’m going to borrow from them here.

There are differences between real-world reading and reading GRE passages is that on the GRE:

• On Test Day, you don’t care about the facts in the passage — you only care about ideas. A passage might tell you that the character Superman first appeared in 1938. You don’t care what year Superman was introduced, but you care about WHY the author told you that. The passage may then go on to describe how the powers attributed to Superman have changed over time. In that case, knowing that Superman has been around for 70+ years might be important.
• Prior knowledge is not welcome on Test Day. Forget everything you might know about Superman — everything  you need to know will be contained within the passage. Wrong answer choices play on things that test-takers understand to be logically true, but if those facts aren’t mentioned in the passage, you don’t care.
• If a passage tells you Superman has a twin sister, then as far as you are concerned, he has a twin sister. The passage text is TRUE. Period. You may question texts as much as you like in real-world reading, but on the GRE, accept that whatever the passage is telling you is correct.

Bolded Statement questions should be tackled the same way as other Reading Comprehension question types. In these questions, you REALLY don’t care about the facts or details. You ONLY care about the purpose of the statements, and you consider each statement separately. Is it an opinion? An example? An argument? If it is an argument, is it the passage’s primary or secondary argument, or perhaps a counterargument? Is it evidence, and if so, of what? You care about the purpose of each statement in relation to the other sentences in the passage.

Let me repeat that. Just as with other question types, you must consider Bolded Statements in the context of the passage as a whole. Do not skip the un-bold statements; they are your context clues for figuring out the role the Bolded Statements play.

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, usage, or style? Email me at jennifer.land@kaplan.com and put “blog question” in your subject line. Then look for a response here!

But I’m not writing this to pat myself on the back or share yet another Kaplan success story. The most interesting feature of Becky’s email is that she didn’t even bother to mention her math score.

This isn’t because she did poorly, or because we didn’t work on the math section. As a matter of fact, Becky told me at our first tutoring session that she wanted to spend all 15 of her tutoring hours on math. She was an English major, so her confidence with the verbal section — and complementary fear of the math section — was hardly surprising. Well, we did spend the first session doing math, since that was what she wanted. I was skeptical, however, that English literature programs were all that interested in her math score.

“Do you know where you’re applying?” I asked her. She rattled off a list. “And have you contacted them to see what they want on the GRE?” Becky, it turned out, had no idea.

I smiled. “Great! That’s your first homework assignment,” I said. “Contact the programs you’re interested in and find out what they want on the math and verbal sections.” Becky did her homework that week, and that was how she discovered that none of her programs cared a rat’s butt about her math score. She also learned that what they did want was an extremely high verbal score — much higher than what she had scored on the diagnostic, even as an English major.

We proceeded to spend the entire remainder her tutoring package working on verbal.

Had we beaten down the math section as Becky initially wanted, the results would have been very hilarious but also very tragic. Since everyone takes the GRE, from French historians to theoretical physicists, there is no universal concept of a “good” performance — “good” varies drastically from program to program.

So now I ask you: have you contacted the schools you’re interested in? Do you know what they actually want you to get on the GRE?

If not, that’s your first homework assignment.

Recently a reader asked me to explain the appropriate uses of two relative pronouns: in which and when.  (I am adding where to the mix, as well, because it has some of the same issues as when.)

A relative pronoun is one that introduces a subordinate clause.  As with all pronouns, the relationship to the antecedent must be clear. This isn’t usually a problem; the tricky thing about these relatives is determining appropriateness.

The basic rule of thumb for written English is that you should NOT use when or where unless you are referring to a time or a place, respectively. Consider the following fragments:

• The shop where we ordered the invitations…
• The season when trees are bare…
• The episode in which Peter was cast as Benedict Arnold…

Because an episode of a television series is neither a place nor a time, it is not appropriate to use where or when. An episode is a setting in which something is portrayed. Other examples are as follows:

• Situations in which one party is at fault…
• Opportunities for which one is improperly dressed…
• Books in which there is an unnamed narrator…
• Theaters where Macbeth is performed… [in which would be OK here as well]
• Evenings when Macbeth is performed… [on which or during which could be OK here]

Sometimes either construction would work. In the Macbeth examples above, where or when are appropriate because they refer to a specific location or time; using a preposition with which would work, too, but most writers prefer the simple, concise where or when whenever permissible.

Keep in mind that the rules are not as stringent for informal spoken English. Peppering your conversations with “in which” would probably sound strange to your friends. The creators of the television series Friends noted this, and they named the episodes the way viewers would casually describe them: “The One Where They’re Going to a Party.”

Unless you are naming something as creative and hugely popular as episodes of Friends, stick to the formal and appropriate constructions when writing. GRE essay graders don’t award points for humor or creativity, but they do reward correct usage. Graduate and professional programs do, too!

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, usage, or style? Email me at jennifer.land@kaplan.com and put “blog question” in your subject line. Then look for a response here!

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?

A few weeks ago [SEPT 14] I blogged about the usefulness of knowing word roots.  I’m sure I will write more about them in the future as well — understanding where words come from helps you to understand what they might mean (and what other words they are related to). Today I’m going to talk about the prefixes we add to those roots.

Many words have commonly used cousins with very different meanings. For example, disinterested doesn’t mean uninterested, much like accept does not mean except. The differences between such pairs of words are found in their prefixes.

• ANTE- (This means before or preceding. It does NOT mean against; that’s anti-. )
• DIS- or DE- (Apart from ; removed or reversed from)
• IN-, IM- or UN- (Not)
• IN- or IM- (In or into)
• EX-, EXTRA- (Outside of, beyond, and sometimes former. Extraordinary means, literally, “beyond the ordinary.”)

The last one for today requires its own paragraph: A- (adopt, asymptomatic). When attached to most adjectives, a- means “without” or “not”; someone who is amoral is without morals. But what about afoot or ashore? Those don’t mean “without foot” or “without shore,” respectively. The prefix here means “on.” The verb aver means “to state as true.” Here a- is what makes the word a verb.

Words with these prefixes are commonly used on the GRE. As you know, sometimes the same letters tacked onto two different roots can have vastly different meanings. Think improbable versus immigrate, or inactive versus innate.

To learn the differences between them, make yourself some flashcards with related words that share the same prefix, and group them by meaning. Come up with a system that works for you. You may want to note the words that look like they might have the same meaning but don’t, like disinterested and uninterested, and note WHY they don’t mean the same thing.

Here are some to get you started:

antechamber, antebellum
antithetical, antibiotic
aplenty, afoot, aground
atypical, asexual, asymmetrical
avow, abut, aver
decamp, deplane
discord, disconnect, disavow, dissimilar, disinterested
exculpate, extraterrestrial
indeterminate, imperturbable,  unadulterated, uninterested
innate, imbue, inflame

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, usage, or style? Email me at jennifer.land@kaplan.com and put “blog question” in your subject line. Then look for a response here!

Vocabulary has always been a blessing and a bane to standardized test takers. There’s something irresistibly romantic about the notion that a higher score may be as close as one or two memorized definitions away, but the words you memorize never seem to come up on the test, do they? Back in high school, I memorized what felt like a billion words in preparation for the SAT; only one of them appeared. (Though I still remember it to this day: soporific. Sleep-inducing.)

Since the old GRE could just as easily spring up ten of the words you studied or none of them, the dread of tackling the English language’s prodigious vocabulary tended to outweigh the promise of easy points. In the new GRE, antonyms and analogies are gone, and with them goes the pressure to memorize a billion potentially useless words.

Now, to anyone studying for the new GRE, this may not appear to be the case. Antonyms and analogies are gone, yes, but haven’t sentence completions morphed into the admittedly scarier text completion and sentence equivalence problems? How is vocabulary less of a threat?

The key is that the bygone antonyms and analogies tested vocabulary knowledge in a much more isolated fashion than sentence-based problems do. Consider this antonym question:

SOPORIFIC

A) GALVANIZING

B) ENERVATING

C) EXCRUCIATING

D) GENEROUS

E) FLIPPANT

If you don’t know what “soporific” is, you’re more or less out of luck, even if you know what some of the other words are. Now look at what happens when we use the same exact words in a sentence equivalence problem:

The professor’s lectures were so ________ that Geoffrey couldn’t stop from dozing through them despite his passion for the subject.

A) GALVANIZING

B) ENERVATING

C) EXCRUCIATING

D) TRUNCATING

E) GENEROUS

F) SOPORIFIC

With practice, you can predict what kind of word should go in the blank on any sentence-completion problem, regardless of the choices. Here, since Geoffrey has a passion for the subject, you’d expect him to be wide awake during the lectures; instead he’s dozing, so the lectures must be very BORING. Even if you don’t know what soporific and enervating (the correct answers) mean, you might see that excruciating (painful) and truncating (cutting short) and generous certainly don’t mean “boring,” and eliminate them from contention.

What remains is to sift through what are arguably the toughest vocabulary words in the problem –galvanizing, enervating, and soporific – and guess which one is the rotten apple. Those are 33% odds, much better than what you had on the antonym problem. If you happen to know that galvanize and energize are synonyms, then you’re home free without knowing either of the correct words.

Critical thinking matters more on the new GRE than vocabulary does. Study some words, but don’t let them put you to sleep.

Well, maybe not. First of all, I spent an inordinate amount of time procrastinating getting started. Could I find 30 straight minutes when I could be sure of being uninterrupted? What word processing software could I use to simulate what is found at the testing center? What should I use as a timer? How could I choose an essay prompt at random without risking seeing it for more than the allotted time? (Fortunately for Kaplan-trained students, these last few questions are easily answered by practicing in the highly realistic interface provided by our full-length practice tests.)

Eventually, I fired up TextEdit on my Mac, set up my iPod Touch with a timer, and told my family members to leave me alone for 40 minutes. Then, I:

• Grabbed an old spiral notebook and a pencil to use for my scratchwork.
• Got the list of “Analyze an Argument” essay assignments (found here) without actually looking at them, then scrolled down a couple pages with no peeking.
• Chose one at random, set the timer for eight minutes (the amount of time Kaplan recommends) for my brainstorming and planning, and got to work.

I swear the timer must not have been working right. Those eight minutes seemed to fly by in about 30 seconds. I hadn’t finished my preparation work, but I immediately reset the timer for 20 minutes and started typing my essay. I wrote what I saw as the bare bones of an essay, hoping to have time to go back later and flesh out some of my points. I made sure to identify the argument’s evidence separately from the conclusion in the opening paragraph and addressed the specific prompt by stating that the argument relied on some unsupported assumptions and was not acceptable in its current form. I then wrote two paragraphs exploring the different flaws and assumptions, showing how these could be used to weaken the conclusion depending on other facts that might be found. My next-to-last paragraph included a possible reprieve for the hapless author, describing a particular fact pattern that, if true, could help make the original case stronger. I even left time at the end to type a brief conclusion restating the evidence and conclusion and declaring the argument still flawed and in need of more support.

Alarm! What? But I’d barely written anything! I had plenty more to say; the paucity of my production had nothing to do with all those great ideas I had in my head. Nonetheless, the timer had gone off, so I reset it for two minutes to allow for some minimal proofreading. I did find a few minor errors of mistyping and punctuation that I was glad to spruce up.

The next day, I tackled the “Analyze an Issue” essay. I chose a topic at random and proceeded using a similar method to the one I’d used for the Argument essay. This time, the amount of time allotted wasn’t nearly as problematic for me. I’m not sure whether it’s the nature of the assignment or whether I’d gained from my experience the day before, but I finished my preparation in six of the eight minutes, then finished the writing itself with three minutes to spare. This allowed for some more serious editing—in this case, a rearrangement of my second paragraph—that improved the essay. For this essay, I used the first paragraph to state my thesis clearly, then gave a quick summary of why this position is correct. I followed this with a paragraph using a personal experience to support my position, another paragraph using reasoning as support, and a third paragraph bringing up a possible counterargument to my position and then knocking it down with facts from a recent independent study. A short concluding paragraph reminds the reader of my position and reinforces it.

Through writing these practice essays, I learned plenty that I hadn’t really understood when merely teaching others how to write the essays. The principal surprise to me was how hard it is to write very much, even for a fast typist with plenty of ideas. What really saved me from disaster was sticking to Kaplan’s timing recommendations. With an onscreen countdown timer on Test Day, keeping track of timing should be almost as easy as it was for me with my alarms. Kaplan’s essay templates and guidance were remarkably useful, helping me make all the types of points I needed for a high-scoring essay. Ultimately, it is essential to write practice essays before tackling them at the testing center. Figure out your own essay-writing flaws and foibles on your own time, when it doesn’t count, and use this experience to learn how to write essays that will yield you terrific scores on your GRE.

What kind of words might we observe on such an excursion? Difficult words – GRE words, if you will – the kind that casual readers would probably skip, or that many listeners would likely ignore. But when you are preparing to take the GRE, you are no longer a casual reader or listener. You are on the hunt!

To earn a high score on the GRE Verbal section, you must have a strong vocabulary. There’s no getting around that simple fact.  But must you know a whole lot of difficult words? Only if “know” means “have heard or read them somewhere before.” As long as you can remember how or where you heard or read them, you’ll be able to tackle even the toughest vocabulary words on Test Day.

What many test-takers don’t realize is that CONTEXT is what it’s all about. The GRE doesn’t require you to define words in a vacuum. You always have contextual clues to guide you. Why is this important? Because remembering that you heard this word on the Food Network, or that you read that one in an article about the Tour de France, could be all you need to know to rule an answer choice in or out.

What does this mean for you? Read! Watch TV! Soak up new words and phrases from the world around you! Be an active reader—and listener. You don’t have to work from lists or flashcards, although they can certainly help you keep track of the new language you’re acquiring. Expanding your vocabulary contextually helps you apply the words you’ve learned. Yes, I said “learned.” This is how you LEARN new words and concepts, by encountering them in the wild and taming them! Memorizing definitions is not the way to succeed on the GRE; instead, observe new words in their original environment so that you will remember HOW they are used and what they represent. Tame them and make them your own!

After three months in the underground bunker, the three prisoners found themselves __________.

(A) enigmatic

(B) enraptured

(C) exhausted

(D) enchanted

(E) enervated

(F) emaciated

Oh big deal… so it’s a Sentence Completion question with one more answer choice. Whoopee—wait… several of those choices seem to work. How is this a valid GRE question? Hmm… maybe the accompanying instructions will shed some light…

“For each of the following questions, choose two of the answer choices that, when used to complete the sentence, produce two logical sentences that are similar in meaning.”

Meet Sentence Equivalence

The leaner, meaner, and… “GREener” version of Sentence Completion, Sentence Equivalence requires that both correct answers work in the blank and give the resulting sentences similar meanings. That’s right—not only must a choice fit logically in the blank, it must also have a partner in crime! In this example, only choices (C) exhausted and (E) enervated produce sentences with similar meanings.

So if you’re studying for the new GRE, don’t put down those vocabulary flashcards just yet. While Antonyms and Analogies may be retiring (we hope the testmaker has a nice pension plan!), knowing thorny, complicated words will never be out of style on the GRE!