In many instances, parents will call me a month before their son or daughter is scheduled to take the SAT. I am confident that with the combination of practice and error analysis I can help students improve their scores on the math and verbal sections.

I actually think that it is easier to help students improve their math scores than it is to improve their verbal scores. The verbal section is influenced by years of reading habits. On the math section, I can observe trends of mistakes and teach the concepts needing to be addressed.

After two years of teaching, I was thinking about leaving the profession, and I found myself studying a list of words to get ready for the GMAT.  What a waste of time!

Why?

Well, many years ago at the Bread Loaf School of English, I went up to my mentor Ken Macrorie and told him I consistently looked up words I didn’t know in the dictionary.

Ken laughed and said, “The average person has a working vocabulary of ten thousand words. Do you think the average person looked all of those words up?”

Of course not. So how does the average person learn all of those words?

His environment has a lot to do with it. Is he or she listening to people who use a variety of words? Do his or her parents use a variety of words to express themselves?

But I think we all know the answer to this linguistic riddle. It has to do with reading, reading, and more reading. An important way we learn new words is by figuring out the meaning of the word by examining the word in context.

So the best way to improve one’s vocabulary is to read, read, and read some more.

A short term solution to the verbal section is to read articles from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Economist. The writers of these publications will be using a sophisticated syntax and vocabulary. Articles from the local newspaper won’t help that much. But then again, it depends on the city in which you live. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I tell my students to subscribe to the New York Times.

 I’ll write more on the topic of vocabulary building because there are some good products that you can buy.