<p>I'm not bad at Critical Reading (about 750), and my vocab is decent. I find the passages and somewhat obvious poems easy-ish. I do fine in them, but the really symbolic poems with tons of implications and indirect language really confuse me. I'm really really bad at them.</p>
<p>Any tips in improving my skill in understanding poems? Or any tips in improving SAT II Lit overall. I'm aiming for a 750+</p>
<p>Also, are there any prep books that are quite decent for it? I have the Kaplan one with 8 tests.</p>
<p>I used Kaplan and got a 770. It was really a hard test for me to study for, some of the poetry was insanely confusing and of course, they’re all different. The only thing I could suggest is to read all of the questions for a passage before answering them. Sometimes I didn’t understand the poems AT ALL, but then the questions kind of cleared up the main idea of it. There was one where I had no clue what it was talking about, until there was a question that said something like “the issue of slavery…” and it all made sense once I knew the poem was referencing slaves.</p>
<p>Also, underline a lot!</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that if critical reading/analyzing doesn’t occur naturally to you, then the only way to improve would be to keep practicing. Read as many passages in practice tests as you can and answer the questions. Read the explanations (in the back of the prep book) for every single question- regardless of whether you got the answer correct. As you continue to practice, I’m sure that your CR skills will improve.</p>