Stacey,

I am a native english speak and also a graduate of the Manhattan GMAT 9 week course. My verbal scores hovers around 36-38. I would like to bring that up to a 40 - 42. I find it very very difficult to improve in verbal. One can study SC and even practice CR patterns, but do you recommend practicing reading comp? Is that a useful place to spend time when every passage is different.

Also, I'm considering a Manhattan GMAT tutor to help me improve. I'm pretty decent on quant, scoring approx a 44 in GMATPrep. Is a tutor useful for verbal?

And yes, I realize I have a typo where I typed I am a native english speaker. Chalk it up to just lousy forum typing :)

Everything is worth practicing - for RC and CR, it's all about technique! So, yes, there's definitely a lot you can do to get better at RC. You mentioned CR patterns - RC passages, questions, and answer choices have patterns, too.

If you haven't already been studying the wrong answers for both RC and CR, start doing so. You should be able to:
- articulate why each wrong answer is wrong
- pick the most tempting wrong answer (or two) and articulate why it's so tempting but still wrong anyway

A tutor can be beneficial, of course, but I don't like to recommend that directly because I have an obvious conflict of interest. I'll just say that, if you hire a tutor and you only want to work on certain areas, ask for someone who's especially strong in those areas.

And no worries on the typo; I make typos all the time! :)