Coming Soon: The GMAT Verbal Bible

April 07, 2008

As you probably know if you're on this site, I wrote The GMAT Math Bible. All along, it was intended to be half of a set; next up is the GMAT Verbal Bible. Many of you have already asked, so I figured it was time to make my plans a little more public.

The GMAT Verbal Bible is projected for release at the end of May. It will be similar in structure to the GMAT Math Bible: I'll break down each question type into subsections that are easier to grasp, and each section will have plenty of practice. The Math Bible now has over 250 practice questions; the Verbal Bible will have at least 200 as well.

I'm announcing all of this now, almost two full months before publication, largely to keep myself on track. While I've released over 20 different Quant resources over the last 16 months, it's more time-consuming to create Verbal material, and I figure if I've told you that I'm going to get it done by the end of May, it's going to be a lot harder to let myself procrastinate!

Verbal Bible Highlights

I think what makes the Math Bible so effective is that I generalize as many concepts as possible. That is, you don't learn how to do specific problems, you learn how to do classes of problems. Data Sufficiency #163 from the Official Guide isn't going to show up on the GMAT, but the concept underlying that problem very well might.

Most Verbal resources break down Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning by question type, which is a nice start. However, it isn't the whole story. First off, such a classification tends to oversimplify things. There aren't a whole lot of questions that just say, "Which of the following is the assumption of the argument above?" That's kind of like an algebra question that asks you to solve for x. It's a good start, but it isn't the level of complexity that you need to score in the 80th percentile.

How else, then, can CR and RC be generalized? Here are a couple:

  • Types of arguments. Some other resources do this as well, but they usually just scratch the surface.
  • Types of passage structure. There are a few templates for RC passages that the GMAT uses over and over. If you can learn to recognize these, you'll spend less time dissecting the passage and more time answering questions.
  • Types of answer choices. This is the big one, the area where I tell my students to spend the most time.

Sentence Correction

The third GMAT Verbal question type is the one that people usually spend the most time on. I've already begun analyzing nearly 1,000 published GMAT Sentence Correction questions, tracking every type of error, every type of wrong answer choice, and every combination of the above.

This extensive research will allow me to create the list of GMAT idioms that you've always wanted, but never had. Every GMAT Verbal book has a list of idioms, but it's either too short--lots of idioms on the test don't appear on the list--or too long--you waste time studying idioms that won't show up on test day. The list that results from poring over hundreds of questions won't be perfect, but it will be as close as possible to what you need to ace this part of the test.

Watch the Site

As I spend the next couple of months completing my work on this book, you'll see quite a bit more Verbal content on the site. I don't know exactly what form that will take, but I do know I'll be writing more about argument types and sentence structure and less about combinations and probability.

I look forward to bringing you the best GMAT Verbal resource on the market!

Jeff Sackmann is a GMAT tutor based in New York City. He has created many resources for GMAT preparation, including the popular GMAT Math Bible and GMAT Verbal Bible, as well as 1,800 practice GMAT math questions.

Need a better Quant score? Check out The GMAT Math Bible.