The Verbal Method
About the founder
Who I am
I’m a credentialed educator who has taught at both the high school and university levels, a curriculum designer, and an SAT Reading and Writing expert who helps students move past score plateaus by identifying what’s costing them points, building a mastery of foundational grammar and punctuation rules, and teaching a repeatable, evidence-based strategy for every question.
The reason I started The Verbal Method was due to the fact that after working with well over 100 students, a clear pattern emerged: high-achieving and gifted students whose SAT Reading and Writing scores did not match their academic achievements or ability. Of course, this counterintuitive phenomenon caught my eye, so I decided to take a closer look at student data to understand the cause. Upon analyzing dozens of test results from students who fit this description, two primary causes stood out:
The Two Biggest Barriers to an Elite Score
Students are trained in school to read slowly, think deeply, and use intuition to interpret meaning. On the SAT, success depends on quickly locating clear textual evidence. The instinct to consider every nuance can lead to overthinking and pacing issues when the test requires fast, literal decisions grounded in the text.
Many students have not truly mastered grammar conventions or learned how to decode dense academic texts efficiently. To earn an elite score, a student must know, without hesitation, when to use a comma or a semicolon and how to make sense of difficult prose under time pressure. The SAT punishes uncertainty in these areas. The good news is that both skill sets are highly learnable.
The work
More than a year of research and writing has gone into building the this curriculum, and new materials are added every week. The Verbal Method is a rigorous and strategically regimented program designed to take good scores to elite scores by developing the requisite mastery of grammar rules, and the ability to decode dense academic writing in a timely and effective manner.
The Best Answer Isn’t the One That Sounds Right. It’s the One You Can Prove.
Explore the Elite Scorer’s ProgramStart here
Begin with a free, detailed diagnostic exam, or read the complete guide to scoring 700+ on SAT Reading and Writing. Best of luck, and happy studying.