Hi guys, I'm noticing my wrong answer journal is full of questions I missed because I either misinterpreted the meaning of an answer choice in relation to an RC (or LR) passage, or I didn't have a good grasp on the passage itself, especially remembering specific lines of text that would have lent direct textual evidence to an answer choice.
Does anyone have advice for reading more literally/granularly (aka not skimming) while holding a good grasp on the overall passage? Writing "read better" in my wrong answer journal is not helping. That brings me to another question...
I feel like most of my time is spent analyzing wrong answers in my wrong answer journal, but I'm having trouble applying what I learned from my mistakes in my next round of drills. I seem to be making the same mistakes/plateauing in my progress despite a lot of wrong answer journaling.
Is this something that will improve with time/practice? Perhaps I'm overdoing it with the time spent journaling and it's working against me? Any strategy advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
2 comments
I like to repeat each paragraph in my own words and write down a quick summary of each paragraph on scratch paper as I read - trying to keep it as short as possible. My goal of course is to move away from needing to physically write it down to remember it but I'm not really referencing my notes anymore and I've gone from missing 3 or 4 questions per passage (yes it was really bad lol) because of misreading down to 2 or 0. I also suggest that as you read you look for the questions you know you're going to have to answer, I take note of main point, relationship of each paragraph to one another, author's tone, role of a paragraph, and structure (ex. First paragraph introduces a problem, second paragraph suggests a solution then explains why its not reasonable, third paragraph does the same as second paragraph etc.). I've also been doing drills of RC 1 passage at a time so that I can review between passages to try and make sure I don't make the same mistakes in one sitting.
Hope if you try one of these things that it can help! Good luck!
@KenickieHenderson Great advice, thanks so much!