How to Approach GRE Text Completion
Many students dread GRE vocabulary-based questions such as Text Completion, simply because they feature obscure, challenging vocabulary words. The good news: to improve at GRE Text Completion, you do NOT need to obsess over unfamiliar vocabulary words.
Instead, concentrate on understanding the author’s intended meaning, and focus on the role that each blank plays in the sentence as a whole. Perfecting this approach is the fastest way to improve your GRE Text Completion results.
GRE Text Completion doesn’t just test your vocabulary skills
One mistake students often make on GRE Text Completion is to think of it solely as a test of vocabulary. Sure, you’ll almost definitely run into some words you don’t know, and a large vocabulary certainly can help your GRE verbal score.
But your reading habits are at least as important as your vocabulary knowledge, because GRE Text Completion doesn’t just evaluate your vocabulary skills. At its heart, GRE Text Completion tests your ability to understand the logic and structure of complex sentences, and to precisely identify the author’s intent.
Before we get into how, exactly, to approach GRE Text Completion questions, let’s get this out of the way:
Should you study vocabulary flashcards for GRE Text Completion?
We realize that this is heresy in test-prep tutoring circles, but here’s the unfortunate truth: unless you plan to dedicate six months or more to beefing up your vocabulary, memorizing definitions isn’t likely to help your GRE verbal score very much.
For starters, there are more than 170,000 words in the English language, and it would require some good fortune – or a TON of studying – for you to learn the words that happen to appear on your GRE exam. The GRE verbal sections include just 20 vocabulary-based questions (12 Text Completion and 8 Sentence Equivalence questions), and nearly any of English’s stockpile of 170,000 words are fair game.
Also, when most students use GRE vocabulary flashcards, they attempt to learn through visual repetition – in other words, staring at the word and its definition until they commit it to memory. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t a very effective or efficient way to improve your vocabulary. In one peer-reviewed study, students who attempted to learn vocabulary via visual repetition actually performed worse than their peers on a vocabulary exam.
If your goal is to build a truly large working vocabulary in English – and if your goal is to understand the words deeply enough to use them effectively on GRE Text Completion questions – the bad news is that the process simply takes time.
If you have months or even years to become a better reader in general, that’s wonderful. But if you’re like most GRE students, you’re probably hoping to conquer the exam in just a few weeks or months, and that’s unlikely to be enough time to truly move the needle on your working vocabulary.
Don’t get us wrong: if you have some extra time on your hands, it probably doesn’t hurt to try to learn a few more vocabulary words. In particular, it may be worthwhile to use a vocabulary app when you’d otherwise struggle to use your time productively – while riding public transit, for example, or standing in line at a grocery store. But otherwise, your time is better spent on other GRE preparation activities.
And this might not sound exciting, but the best way to improve at GRE Text Completion is to learn to read the questions in a systematic way.
How to Read GRE Text Completion Questions
Warning: what you’re about to read might sound dumb. But we can promise that the overwhelming majority of GRE test-takers make this mistake.
When most people encounter GRE Text Completion for the first time, they often read the sentence itself fairly quickly, and then start punching answer choices into the blanks to see which ones sound right.
Don’t do this. We know: it’s tempting. You might not even be aware that you’re doing it. But after more than 20 years of GRE tutoring, we can guarantee that this approach will lead to disappointing results on Text Completion questions.
Instead, take your time reading the sentence. Make sure that you understand two things:
What is the author REALLY trying to communicate in this sentence? Ask yourself: what argument or distinction is being made, and why did the author write this? If you shortcut this process, your odds of making a silly error will increase enormously.
What role does the blank (or blanks) play in the sentence as a whole? Does the missing part of the sentence support some other part of the sentence? Does it contradict something else in the sentence, or provide some sort of counterpoint? You’ll need to be specific and precise with this step; just saying that the blank is “positive” or “negative” won’t help you at all.
The key is to answer these questions thoroughly BEFORE you start worrying about the answer choices at all. If you don’t, you’ll be at risk of falling for answer choices that “sound good”, but don’t actually convey the logical meaning of the sentence.
Using Process of Elimination on GRE Text Completion
So you’ve read the sentence carefully and then thoughtfully determined how the blanks relate to the overall meaning and purpose of the sentence. Now, it’s time to tackle the answer choices.
And this is also going to sound silly, but here’s the key: don’t fall in love with an answer choice.
Even if you’ve done a brilliant job of analyzing the sentence and the purpose of the blanks, it’s remarkably easy to just pick an answer choice that “sounds good.” Often, a wrong answer choice will “sound” absolutely perfect, given the words that immediately surround the blank. But if that nice-sounding word doesn’t match the logical meaning of the sentence, it’s wrong.
So stay focused: after you’ve determined the role of each blank, evaluate each answer choice to see whether it successfully performs its role in the sentence as a whole. At this point, three outcomes are possible:
If you’re certain that the answer choice does NOT perform that role, eliminate it.
If you’re certain that the answer choice DOES perform that role, keep it.
If you’re not sure – or if you have no freaking clue what the word means – keep it for now, unless you’re 100% certain that you have a better option.
The bottom line: instead of choosing a word that “sounds good,” stay focused on meaning, making use of the work you’ve already done in analyzing the sentence and its blanks. And on your first pass through the answer choices, be conservative: if you’re not sure that an answer choice is wrong, hold onto it.
Applying this process to a GRE Text Completion question
Let’s try applying this to an actual GRE Text Completion question.
Vain and prone to violence, Caravaggio could not handle success: the more his (i)__________ as an artist increased, the more (ii)__________ his life became.
We can’t say this enough: our first job as test-takers is to invest thoroughly in understanding the purpose of the sentence. In this case, the author is ripping Caravaggio, and connecting his personal traits (“vain” and “prone to violence” – lovely!) to his inability to handle success.
Our second job is to think carefully about the purpose of the two blanks. Clearly, everything after the colon will support or deepen the author’s initial statement that the vain, violent Caravaggio “could not handle success.”
So logically, the first blank should reinforce the idea that Caravaggio achieved success, and the second blank should connect that success to the artist’s lamentable personality traits. Since we know that Caravaggio was “vain and prone to violence,” the word in the second blank should be consistent with those characteristics.
Now we’re ready for the answer choices:
But before we continue, let’s illustrate how things can go wrong.
How to screw up a GRE Text Completion Question
Now, we’re going to demonstrate what NOT to do with blank (i). On this particular question, we’ve heard plenty of our tutoring students say something like this:
“Notoriety” works! Caravaggio was a famous artist, so it sounds good to say “the more his notoriety as an artist increased”. The first blank is (B).
There are two huge problems with this:
The student didn’t use process of elimination, and “fell in love” with an answer choice without fully considering the others.
The student wasn’t thinking clearly about the overall meaning of the sentence – or the specific language used in the sentence – and instead picked an answer that “sounds good.” The author clearly intends to connect Caravaggio’s personality traits with his success as an artist – and success isn’t necessarily the same thing as fame or notoriety.
“Notoriety” isn’t necessarily a terrible answer. If you’re successful, maybe you’re also well-known. But the test-taker’s process wasn’t quite right: the student fell in love with (B) because it “sounded good” in its immediate surroundings, and didn’t check to see if another answer choice did a better job of conveying the author’s overall meaning.
How to NOT screw up GRE Text Completion questions
Here’s the full question again:
Vain and prone to violence, Caravaggio could not handle success: the more his (i)__________ as an artist increased, the more (ii)__________ his life became.
For blank (i), we need something that sets up the idea that “Caravaggio could not handle success” – or more specifically, something that indicates that Caravaggio was increasingly successful.
(A) is fairly easy to eliminate. “Temperance” is moderation or self-restraint, which aren’t terms that the author would use to describe Caravaggio.
(B) isn’t an ideal fit. As we said above, “notoriety” means “well-known”, which isn’t the same thing as successful. Many serial killers and reality TV stars achieve notoriety; that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re successful, exactly. You could be conservative and keep (B), but there’s a better option here.
(C) is perfect. “Eminence” is the condition of being respected and successful, which is exactly what we’re going for based on the first half of the sentence.
For blank (ii), we’re trying to echo the idea that Caravaggio’s increasing success (or eminence) brought out his worst traits (vain, prone to violence). So which of these three would fulfill that role?
(D) fits pretty well. If you’re “vain and prone to violence” and “could not handle success”, your life could be described as tumultuous or unstable. Let’s keep (D).
(E) is nonsense. “Providential” means that something came at an ideal time, and involved good fortune or divine blessings. That definitely has nothing to do with our vain, violent artist friend.
(F) is also a bad fit. A vain, violent artist almost certainly isn’t “dispassionate.”
So our answers are (B) and (D).
What to do with Words You Don’t Know on GRE Text Completion
No matter how precisely or carefully you read, you’ll almost certainly encounter words you don’t know on GRE Text Completion – maybe tons of them. And that’s not a pleasant feeling at all.
Let’s start with what NOT to do when you encounter words you don’t know on the GRE:
Don’t obsess over them! Time is your most precious resource on the GRE, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word just by staring at it for several minutes. Some students try to figure out a word’s meaning by breaking it down into roots. Unfortunately, aside from a few cherry-picked examples that GRE test-prep companies love, this method is usually a waste of time.
Don’t eliminate (or select) answers just BECAUSE you don’t know them. Complicated words are just as likely to be right as to be wrong. So if you don’t know the meaning of a word, there’s no point in eliminating (or selecting) it right away. Just hold onto it, and see if you can eliminate the other options.
So what should you do instead when you see an unfamiliar word in a Text Completion answer choice? Don’t obsess, don’t stress – just hold onto the answer choice and keep going.
But what if a question has lots of words you don’t know?
If that happens, mark the question, make your best guess, then come back later if you have time. Again, time is your most precious resource on the GRE, so don’t waste time on questions that you’re unlikely to answer correctly anyway. If you have time at the end of the section, you can always come back to the questions you marked, and obsess over them as much as you’d like until time expires.
Use Official GRE Text Completion Questions Only
The creators of the GRE exam spend literally thousands of dollars developing each individual test question, so even the very best test-prep companies are bound to fall short. On GRE Text Completion, the difference between a right and wrong answer might be a tiny nuance of language, and it’s unreasonable to expect non-official verbal questions to nail those nuances, given the enormous resources that ETS invests into each official GRE Text Completion question.
Put another way: using non-official GRE Text Completion questions can do more harm than good.
So without exception, we strongly encourage you to use official practice questions from resources such as the GRE Official Guide or the Official GRE Verbal Reasoning Guide. For Text Completion, you can also use much older practice questions from out-of-print official GRE guides such as this thing or even this one.
Learn more about the GRE:
How to approach GRE Sentence Equivalence (spoiler alert: it’s not so different from Text Completion)