Does anyone know of articles, journals, or newspapers that I can read to get accustomed to humanities passages (logic, history, literary critiques) on the verbal reasoning section?
Verbal Reasoning Reading
- Thread starter adam17
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Read the opinion sections of the NY Times and the WSJ. Also read articles from sciencedaily.com. These three sources have helped me tremendously. Read everyday (and map the articles of course). A few articles a day keeps a low VR score away!
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I would give my advice on how to score 15 on my VR (since I was scoring that on practice), but I choked or something on the actual test and scored an 11, so I won't try.
But I didn't use any of the standard advice (except to do practice AAMC tests) and I think I'd score above a 13 8/10 times I take it. You have to read the right type of things, under the right type of circumstances.
But I didn't use any of the standard advice (except to do practice AAMC tests) and I think I'd score above a 13 8/10 times I take it. You have to read the right type of things, under the right type of circumstances.
I think its a myth that reading newspapers, articles improves the verbal score. The best way to improve is to do practice passages. The hard part of verbal is answering the questions not reading the passage
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Agreed. Reading "difficult" works can't help you in the short-term. It's one of those things you have to do for many, many years for it to have a meaningful effect on you.
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I agree but reading the passage can be just as difficult for some people. If you don't understand what's going on in the passage, then it becomes difficult to answer the questions. And reading/understanding a passage can be difficult at times for some people, especially if its an esoteric, convoluted passage. There are hard passages with easy questions, and vice versa. Its not a "myth," it worked for me. Reading/practicing to map articles helped me extract the main idea of the passage while ignoring details. That is just my experience, though. Of course, that alone will not help; practice is a must! I'm not saying it'll work magically for someone who hasn't picked up a book in years, as there are required skills that are developed over the years (as ColeOnTheRoll mentioned above). However, when done in conjunction with practice, it may help, as it helped me. In the end, I think it all comes down to what works for each individual. Everyone is different. That's just my 2 cents.
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I'm not saying just reading those passages will help me get a higher verbal score because I know practice is the most important. I just want to get more comfortable reading those types of passages so I can try and see if I can map those passages.
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Define short term. If short term refers to the period in which an individual is preparing to take MCAT (3-4 months), I agree with you for the most. But anything longer than that, reading newspapers can help.
Also, I must say that there is a "level" of "difficult" works. There are some materials that are grouped under "difficult" but aren't really difficult (Economist is an example; it's not THAT difficult as people here say it is). The more "difficult" materials is the scholarly journals or anthology of philosophical essays. These do help you.
