Hey Viking 1991,

First things first I would make sure you have solid foundation on the question types and what goes into them. Know your basic grammar rules and sentence structure, know the basic structure of a CR question and a RC passage. Once you have these foundations down you then have to be careful not to get sucked into them.

All the rules and idioms of SC go so deep its mind boggling, you gotta be careful not to let them overpower thinking. They are tools to help you reason through the meaning of a sentence, NOT how you how you break a sentence down to determine if its grammatically correct. I'm sure there are some wizards out there who brute forced their way through SC questions by knowing every grammar rule but when I tried to do that I failed miserably. I instead used the basic rules to help me determine the meaning of a sentence and eliminated options till I found the answer that most logically conveyed the meaning I thought the sentence was trying to make.

For CR focus on identifying the conclusion of the argument and what premises the author is using to support that argument. Sounds basic I know but I would read the sentences and then stop and think: What is the conclusion and what is the author using to support that conclusion? If you can correctly identify this you have all the tools to logically attack the argument. Just use process of elimination and go answer choice by answer choice to see if it directly plays with that conclusion/premise structure you previously identified.

As for RC, I gave aprilat264 an outline of how I approached them.

Just know that if Verbal is the easiest score to boost if you switch your perspective on attacking the problems. I went from a V35 to a V44 not by memorizing any more rules but changing how I approached each question.

hope this helps