Reading Comprehension & Essays GRE Strategy Guide, 4th Edition

by Manhattan Prep

Written by Manhattan Prep’s high-caliber GRE instructors, the Reading Comprehension & Essays GRE Strategy Guide provides a comprehensive approach to Reading Comprehension passages and questions on the GRE. It contains practical techniques for perceiving passage structures rapidly and for grasping difficult, unfamiliar content. This Guide teaches you how to attack questions through effective classification and analysis, following a clear process for answering both general and specific questions and avoiding common traps along the way. Furthermore, you will learn how to master dynamic outlining and writing techniques for tackling the essays.

Each chapter provides comprehensive coverage of the subject matter using rules, strategies, and in-depth examples to help you build confidence and content mastery. In addition, the Guide contains complete problem sets, with detailed answer explanations written by top-scorers, and numerous exercises that you can use to train yourself in reading and writing more efficiently.

Purchase of this book includes six months of access to 6 Manhattan Prep online section-adaptive GRE exams.

Genres: Nonfiction

329 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 5, 2012

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book as a jumping off point for studying for the verbal section of the GRE. Although I work in journalism and edit for a living, I found myself not doing as well as I would like on the verbal practice tests. This book was one of the first resources I turned to in order to overcome this. It teaches you how to read the passages in the most effective way, and arms you with a lot of good strategies for approaching the passages. In particular, the advice on the select two sentence completion questions and long passages was invaluable.

That said, I would not rely only on the Manhattan guides to prep you for the exam. You should definitely take practice tests created by other prep providers, such as Kaplan and Peterson's. After a while, it seemed as though the Manhattan practice tests were written to be beaten by their strategies and that the passages themselves did not reflect as closely those found on the exams. The Kaplan online exams seemed to most accurately mirror the actual exam in my opinion. I scored in the 96th percentile in verbal with around 2.5 months of intensive prep time.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I would have given this one a 3... the explanations are pretty wordy throughout. If you need to be taught how to read effectively from the basics, perhaps the book would be more useful. There just weren't enough sample questions to test your skills or drill effectively in simulation of the test.

The reason I gave this a 4 is because the section on the Argument Analysis Essay is pretty awesome. They breakdown 19 different ways an argument can break logic and is weakened in a clear and effective manner. It's more clearly represented than Princeton Review's discussion of those essays.

Happy studying!

[Johannes · Rating 2 out of 5]

The section on Analytical Writing is a great resource for acing that part of the test, but the rest is pretty useless.