GMAT Verbal Tips and Tricks for the Focus Edition: Top 10

Reading Time: 14 minutes

Last Updated on April 19, 2024

It’s not uncommon for test-takers preparing for the GMAT Focus to find increasing their Verbal scores challenging. Unfortunately, finding GMAT Verbal tips and tricks that actually work can also be a challenge.

So, in this article, I provide my top 10 tips for Focus Edition GMAT Verbal prep. From increasing your speed and accuracy on practice questions to eliminating the remaining two answer choices in a question, you’ll get simple strategies that will help you make steady, tangible improvements in your performance on the GMAT Focus Verbal section.

Here are the topics we’ll discuss:

• Is the GMAT Verbal Section Difficult on the Focus Edition?
• Tip 1: Learn a Specific Strategy for Each Verbal Question Type
• Tip 2: Do Much of Your GMAT Verbal Practice Untimed
• Tip 3: Achieve High Accuracy Before Practicing Timed
• Tip 4: To Be Fast, Be Precise
• Tip 5: Make a Point of Doing the Basics Better
• Tip 6: Create Your Own Answer Explanations
• Tip 7: Don’t Guess Between the Last Two Answer Choices
• Tip 8: Don’t Focus on What the Test Has Done in the Past
• Tip 9: Treat Verbal Questions with Respect
• Tip 10: Foster a Growth Mindset
• GMAT Verbal Tips for the Focus Edition: Key Takeaways
• What’s Next?

If you’ve been wondering, How do I improve my Verbal for the GMAT Focus?, this guide is for you!

Before we get into our 10 tips for the GMAT Verbal section, let’s address a common misconception about GMAT Verbal Reasoning on the Focus Edition.

Is the GMAT Verbal Section Difficult on the Focus Edition?

Now that Sentence Correction, with its pesky grammar rules to learn, is no longer part of GMAT Verbal Reasoning, some test-takers have been wondering whether preparing for the GMAT Verbal section is really a big deal anymore.

It’s true that, even with solid grammar knowledge, GMAT students typically had to devote many study hours to mastering SC questions. So, with SC gone, many students will find that they can prepare for the GMAT Verbal section in a shorter period of time and with less stress.

That said, Critical Reasoning (CR) and Reading Comprehension (RC) are nothing to sneeze at. In fact, many test-takers consider Critical Reasoning questions to be some of the trickiest GMAT questions. Additionally, many test-takers find that they need significant training to maintain focus while reading and analyzing RC passages.

Plus, there are many different types of CR and RC questions to master. And, as we’ll discuss, you need separate strategies for solving each type. So, it’s really no wonder that GMAT Focus test-takers still find the Verbal section quite challenging.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Maybe CR is your strong suit. Maybe you’d rather get a root canal than answer a grammar question. Even so, I wouldn’t go into any aspect of your GMAT Focus preparation expecting it to be a breeze. (For more on this topic, check out our post on whether the GMAT Focus is harder than the legacy GMAT.)

I wouldn’t go into any aspect of your GMAT Focus preparation expecting it to be a breeze.

Now, let’s get into the first of our GMAT Verbal section tips and tricks: having a specific strategy for answering each Verbal question type.

Tip 1: Learn a Specific Strategy for Each Verbal Question Type

Most test-takers wouldn’t expect to use the same strategy to answer two different types of Quant questions. So, why would we expect to be successful in GMAT Focus Verbal without different strategies for different question types?

An Inference question involves different concepts and requires different skills than an Assumption question. A Strengthen question employs different tricks than a Weaken question. Finding a passage’s main idea is different from identifying the purpose of part of a passage. And so on.

So, to master GMAT Verbal Reasoning, you must learn specific strategies for each Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension question type. Having an effective strategy for each type of Verbal question is super-helpful for multiple reasons.

First, you’ll be more likely to get questions correct. For example, one strategy we teach students for efficiently answering CR Evaluate the Argument questions is the Yes/No Test. The Yes/No Test brings into sharp focus which answer choice actually helps us evaluate an argument and which choices are perhaps just related to the argument in some other way. So, identifying correct answers and avoiding traps becomes much simpler.

Second, a smart strategy can help you answer a question faster. For example, one key strategy for answering RC Specific Purpose questions is to reread the sentence preceding the part of the passage the question focuses on. By using that strategy, you gain the context necessary to more quickly discern the purpose of the specified part.

So, make sure you’re using a study resource that provides specific strategies for each Verbal question type. The Target Test Prep GMAT Focus Course does just that. Give it a try for free!

Tip 2: Do Much of Your GMAT Verbal Practice Untimed

People studying for the GMAT Focus often make the mistake of always attempting to complete practice questions at test pace. The thing is, test pace is not enough time to learn to answer a Verbal question.

When answering Verbal practice questions, we have to train ourselves to do two main things:

• methodically apply concepts and strategies we’ve recently learned
• carefully analyze answer choices one by one.

At first, doing these things effectively will take longer than a couple minutes per question. In fact, doing them can take 15 minutes or more for some questions.

This work may feel painstaking, but it’s necessary if you want to be able to consistently get Verbal questions correct. Rushing through many questions and getting many of them wrong is never going to help us solidify our Verbal skills as much as completing fewer questions but doing them systematically and purposefully, however long that takes.

So, when should you start practicing Verbal questions with the timer going? Our next tip addresses this question.

Tip 3: Achieve High Accuracy Before Practicing Timed

One of the more counterintuitive aspects of mastering GMAT Verbal Reasoning is that giving ourselves all the time we need to learn to answer questions well actually improves our ability to answer questions under time limits. After all, if we don’t yet know how to do something well, can we really expect to do it correctly quickly?

Still, it’s a very common mistake for GMAT students to put the cart before the horse in their thinking about speed and accuracy. Speed develops as accuracy improves. So, when answering practice questions, our first priority should be to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to achieve high accuracy. Once we’re achieving high accuracy untimed, we’ll be in a position to work on speeding up to test pace.

If we reverse that process and practice timed before achieving high accuracy, we’re bound to be disappointed with our results. And, in the end, we’ll have wasted time on practice that was not as productive as it could have been.

So, if you want to score high on GMAT Focus Verbal, in your untimed practice of each question type, aim for the following benchmarks before practicing that type timed:

• close to 100 percent accuracy on easy questions
• over 90 percent accuracy on medium questions
• over 70 percent accuracy on hard questions

Tip 4: To Be Fast, Be Precise

Time-management is one of the chief concerns among people preparing for the GMAT Focus. That concern often becomes more acute when students study for the Verbal section. Why? Because your pacing will need to vary more between Critical Reasoning and

Reading Comprehension questions in the Verbal section than between Problem Solving questions in the Quant section. So, unsurprisingly, students often ask us, How can I improve my GMAT Verbal timing?

In addition to our other pacing-related tips, focusing on precision is a key way to increase your speed in Verbal.

For example, suppose we breeze through a CR passage without precisely identifying the elements of the argument. In that case, we may end up cycling through the answer choices repeatedly because we can’t clearly see how each choice relates to the argument. That is, because we weren’t precise, it may take us a long time to answer the question.

Alternatively, if we carefully read the passage and precisely identify each element of the argument, we’ll understand the relationship between the argument and each answer choice more quickly.

This approach applies to Reading Comprehension as well. For example, if we’re not precisely analyzing the meaning of each answer choice in an RC question and instead simply looking for an answer that “sounds like” something the passage says, we’re going to have a heck of time eliminating incorrect answers. Why? Because many trap answers in RC questions “sound like” things the passage says.

In general, even though being precise may seem to take longer, it actually helps us answer Verbal questions faster.

So, to be fast in the GMAT Verbal section, be precise when practicing.

Tip 5: Make a Point of Doing the Basics Better

You may think that the only way to increase your Verbal score is to do something difficult or involved. However, you can also increase your score significantly just by doing basic things better.

For instance, in Reading Comprehension questions, incorrect answer choices are often half right and half wrong. So, if you read only the beginning of a choice before deciding it’s right or wrong, you could easily miss the part of the choice that is not correct. Test-takers choose incorrect RC answers for this reason all the time. By simply reading RC answer choices in their entirety, you avoid making a common, score-eroding misstep.

Similarly, in Critical Reasoning questions, there are sometimes incorrect answers that do the opposite of what the correct answer must do. All the same, those incorrect answers may be relevant to the given argument. So, if you lose track of what the question is asking, you can easily fall for one of these “opposite traps.” GMAT test-takers make this error all the time.

Of course, if you perform the simple step of making sure you’ve firmly identified what the question is asking for–or double-checking that your answer does what the question asks before you make your selection–you can avoid this trap.

Notice that these are pretty basic aspects of answering Verbal questions: read the entire answer choice, identify what the question is asking for–not the most complex stuff. Nevertheless, you will be surprised at how much your Verbal performance can improve if you make a point of executing these basics flawlessly.

Tip 6: Create Your Own Answer Explanations

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

In fact, I’ve seen GMAT students read literally hundreds of answer explanations without achieving Verbal score increases. Why? Because every Verbal question is different. Every question has its own subject matter and “quirks.” So, you could carefully study dozens of answer explanations and not still master GMAT Verbal because you’ll inevitably see new questions to which the explanations you’ve studied don’t apply.

Creating your own answer explanations is another story. 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 answer choice is incorrect or correct.

With that in mind, even if you get Verbal questions correct, you shouldn’t be satisfied unless you can fully explain what is going on in them. Learn to explain Verbal questions as an expert would, and guess what? You’ll become an expert at answering them!

To create your own answer explanations, read every component of each question carefully, and ask yourself the following:

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

Using your concept knowledge and careful choice-by-choice analysis, explain those key aspects of the question. With time, you’ll see your ability to efficiently “decode” Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions soar.

Tip 7: Don’t Guess Between the Last Two Answer Choices

One of the most common pitfalls people encounter when preparing for the Verbal section of the GMAT Focus is the urge to guess between their remaining two answer choices in a practice question. What happens is that a student eliminates three out of five answer choices relatively easily and is left with two that are harder to choose between. Then, having trouble deciding which is correct, the student basically gives up and guesses. Taking this approach can seriously undermine the effectiveness of your GMAT Verbal prep.

In fact, we could say that the Verbal Reasoning game is all about deciding between the last two answer choices. After all, the other three choices are generally relatively easy to eliminate. So, much of what we do in answering Verbal questions is aimed at deciding between the infamous remaining two.

So, if we guess between the last two choices, we’re skipping what is possibly the most important step in answering a Verbal question. In other words, we’re almost not even practicing. We’re certainly not practicing doing what we need to do to master GMAT Focus Verbal, and we’ll likely see little progress.

So, don’t guess between your remaining two answer choices when practicing! Instead, expect it to be hard to decide between the last two choices, and stick with the question until you’ve figured out how to decide. That way, you’ll be learning to do what it takes to achieve your Verbal score goal.

If we guess between the last two choices, we’re skipping what is possibly the most important step in answering a Verbal question.

Tip 8: Don’t Focus on What the Test Has Done in the Past

Often, GMAT Verbal tips and tricks involve “what the GMAT Focus does.” For example, someone might say, “In a CR question about a city, information about another city is not relevant to the argument. That’s what the test does.”

Here’s the thing though: It’s true that the test has done what I just mentioned. However, it’s also true that the test has done the opposite. In other words, information about a city has been relevant in a CR question about another city.

The fact is, when people talk about “what the GMAT Focus does,” they are often talking about what the test has done in the past. However, what the test has done in the past isn’t necessarily what will happen on your test. After all, language is flexible and what doesn’t work in one context may work in another.

Moreover, there are many ways that Verbal questions can work. So, the questions you see on test day could be rather different from past questions.

Thus, if you’re overly focused on preparing for exactly what went on in past test questions, you may get false impressions of what “must be” correct or incorrect.

Now, I’m not saying to totally ignore what goes on in official practice questions from the past. Some general patterns that appear in past questions can be useful to know. The point is, you’ll get better results by learning concepts, strategies, and logic that you can apply to Verbal questions of any stripe than by focusing on memorizing specific patterns from past questions.

Tip 9: Treat Verbal Questions with Respect

This tip might sound a bit funny, but the point of it is that the GMAT Focus is a pretty sophisticated test. After all, it’s an entrance exam for graduate business school. The thing is, people often don’t treat the Verbal section as sophisticated. Rather, they seek to answer the questions using hacks or surface-level approaches that don’t fit the sophistication of the test. They may even select answer choices by simply considering what sounds or feels right.

These test-takers aren’t treating Verbal Reasoning with respect. Rather, they’re acting as if Verbal questions don’t require much in terms of reasoning. And the outcome of acting that way is that they have trouble achieving their Verbal score goals.

Think about it: You wouldn’t choose an answer to a Rates question in the Quant section by just going with what feels right. You’d do the math necessary to confidently select one of the choices as correct.

So, as woo-woo as it may seem, a key aspect of mastering Verbal on the GMAT Focus is treating the questions with respect. See them as sophisticated challenges to your critical thinking and reasoning skills rather than things you can game without thinking much. Expect to have to use precise logic to answer them correctly. You’ll see how adopting such a view of Verbal questions helps you to consistently perform at a higher level in GMAT Verbal.

Tip 10: Foster a Growth Mindset

Mindset plays an important role in our GMAT Verbal prep and our performance on test day. A growth mindset is characterized by the belief that we are capable of developing ourselves and improving our basic skills. In other words, we recognize that our abilities are not fixed. Such a mindset can help us to master Verbal Reasoning by giving us confidence that, whatever our current skill level, we can develop stronger skills with time and effort.

There are many things you were probably once not so great at that you’re now quite skilled in. You may even be an expert in some of those things. GMAT Verbal is no different. If you consider all of the new things you’ve learned over your lifetime, you can see quite clearly that you don’t have to start off being great at something in order to become great at it.

Consider also that many, many GMAT test-takers have made substantial increases in their Verbal scores. There is no reason that you can’t achieve something similar to what they achieved. For some inspiration, check out this debrief from a test-taker who increased his GMAT Focus score by 140 points and earned a perfect Verbal score.

Remember, every time you learn a new Verbal concept or strategy, every time you work through a tough practice question until the end, you’re developing new skills and getting better at GMAT Verbal. So, foster a growth mindset, and then put in the work to grow!

Let’s wrap up with the key takeaways from the GMAT Verbal section tips we’ve discussed.

GMAT Verbal Tips for the Focus Edition: Key Takeaways

How do you crack the GMAT Verbal Reasoning section? Start by following these 10 tips:

1. Learn a specific strategy for each Verbal question type.
2. Do much of your GMAT Verbal practice untimed.
3. Achieve high accuracy before practicing timed.
4. To be fast, be precise.
5. Make a point of doing the basics better.
6. Create your own answer explanations.
7. Don’t guess between the last two answer choices.
8. Don’t focus on what the test has done in the past.
9. Treat Verbal questions with respect.
10. Foster a growth mindset.

What’s Next?

Nervous about Verbal Reasoning because English isn’t your first language? Check out our GMAT Verbal preparation tips for non-native English speakers.

If you’re wondering how the vocabulary-heavy GRE Verbal section stacks up against GMAT Focus Verbal, have a look at this detailed comparison.

And for Quant tips, check out our guide to increasing your GMAT Focus Quant score.

Happy studying!