Week 3: Vexed by Verbal Reasoning | GMAT Summer Study Series with Hailey Cusimano, Menlo Coaching

Yeah.

So this is a really interesting question because I would argue that my guidance may be a little less universal than some of the other things that we've spoken about.

I think that in cases where maybe English is a second language for a particular candidate and they need to kind of refine their English speaking and reading chops, there's certainly some space for that.

When I have students who are curious about reading and they like to read in their spare time, there are certainly some spaces where I might direct where that leading would head, in particular in spaces like lateral thinking exercises, spaces that challenge their preconceived notions about a particular topic because it helps them to think outside the box a little bit.

But in terms of asking hands-on study time that's being invested in their verbal preparation.

I typically wouldn't be inclined to swap out their active preparation time with additional just broad strokes reading time, whether it's scientific journal posts or articles in the newspaper.

And I say this because especially when it comes to reading comprehension.

GMAT reading comprehension passages are constructed with a ton of intention.

We've spoken in every episode so far about the fact that the GMAT's an incredibly data-driven exam.

They know what types of mistakes candidates tend to make.

They know what types of biases they tend to bring into questions.

And that means that As somebody who spent a little over a decade moving through GMAP passages, you can almost, as you're reading, start to tell that in a paragraph where the paragraph just rapid fires a bunch of comparisons and contrasts, there's a pretty good chance that the author of this passage is doing that.

So they can set up a kind of a layup inference question where the passage told you A came before B.

And so you need to be able to infer that B came after A or B.

The passage told you A was larger than B, so you need to be able to infer that B was smaller than A.

And in much the same way, a lot of the structural language, a lot of the cues, and a lot of the components of the passage itself that make GMAT exercises and reading comprehension definitive, make them unarguable, are absent from just the reading that you're doing on a day-to-day basis.

And even stylistically, the way we read It's very different than the way we read on a day-to-day basis because on a day-to-day basis, we're reading to pick up and store details.

The details are what are going to be useful to us, whether it's a textbook or a text message or an email or a blog post.

The details are the nuts and bolts of what we're going to be able to do something with.

And in the context of the GMAT, it's not particularly useful to pick up and store a bunch of details because, well, the details are going to be in front of us.

We're going to want to reference back to them because we want to make sure we're doing so with an eye out for precision in language, that we're keeping things in the author's terms.

And so instead of reading for what the information is saying, GMAT passages tend to task us with understanding why the information was placed there in the first place, putting ourselves in the shoes of the author and understanding intent, understanding movement, structural language.

And that's something that I find is very unique stylistically to the way a GMAT passage is authored.

that if you're thinking about the actual seated hands-on preparation time that you're spending, would be best suited in the context of official GMAT passages.

Now, I am certainly not one to dissuade people from reading.