An important thing to know about GRE verbal reasoning is that just because a strategy works on one question doesn't mean it'll work on EVERY question.

The way I see it is that I'm going to give you tools so that you become more versatile in terms of figuring out questions. Through this course's videos and your own practice, you'll gain experience that will enable you to make better decisions about which tool to use when.

For example, in text completion questions, understanding the gist of the passage - or the story it's telling - is sometimes crucial and sometimes largely unnecessary. So for vocab questions, we use our normal reading ability and when in doubt, we can get more mechanical with our strategies.

There's no need to whip out every tool every time. Use discretion; be as mechanical as needed with your strategies but not at the expense of your own instincts about what's going on.

Note: the stronger your reading comprehension, the more help you'll get from those instincts. And vice versa.