Reading a little every day not only helps build your vocabulary but also hones your critical thinking skills. It gives you excellent preparation for the type of Reading Passages you’ll see and allows you to practice the kind of active reading you need for the SAT. Furthermore, even though your essay is intended to be a first draft, one of the best ways to improve your writing is to read the works of excellent writers.

Read conventional, nonexperimental fiction from the last 100 years or so, as well as nonfiction from newspapers and magazines, such as the The New York Times, Harper’s, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Scientific American, The Nation, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic. You can find these periodicals in your local library. Many of these publications also have free online versions. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we purposely chose only very well-written magazines and newspapers.

If you’re looking for some fiction to read, stick with the more conventional authors—folks you’d read in school, most likely, such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Toni Morrison.