I started studying RC in April after solely focusing on LR, it was odd and I didn’t know how people got so good at RC until I started watching J.Y’s passage explanations
I didn’t watch his passage explanations to try and figure out what details I missed, I obviously missed details as I was getting 12-13 wrong constantly but I watched his passage explanations to see how he was reading
The biggest takeaway that I took from J.Y was his ability to literally connect a sentence from the third paragraph and connect it back to the first paragraph. I saw that J.Y was going sentence by sentence dissecting and piecing it together while still creating an entire passage map that held all the minute details together, it was in realizing this that I incorporated a similar style of reading and it has catapulted my RC score, and today I scored my first -4 on RC ever after 5 months of dedicated study to RC alongside a balance of LR
Thank you 7Sage
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If you want to see what I’m talking about, boot up one of his passage explanations because man it is gold and not a waste of your time
thats awesome! was your -4 an untimed section? or was it like test day conditions? asking because RC is by far my weakest section so any advice you have will be much appreciated!
@adzballroom Not the one who made the post, but the advice given in that recent video 7Sage posted is really good. What helped me a lot was just this: Slow down enough to trust your initial read. The test is ultimately testing how well you understood what you just read, not your ability to go back and hunt for answers.
What that means in practice for me:
I usually spend a minimum of 4 minutes on each passage before heading to the Questions. Sometimes longer.
As I read a question, and then the answer choices, I DO NOT go back to the passage to confirm one of the answer choices, even if it sounds like it could be right, until you have read EVERY answer choice. AC A might sound pretty close to correct, but AC E might be so obvious that once you get to it you're just going to choose it. And also once you find an answer choice that feels correct, get to a point where you can TRUST YOUR INSTINCT. In this scenario, any time spent trying to check for the accuracy of AC A was wasted time. If you spend an unnecessary extra 30 seconds going back to the passage to check an AC, that you ultimately didn't have to, if done for every third question, that's an extra 4-5 minutes wasted on the exam.
After spending 1 minute on a question where I'm only able to narrow it down to two ACs, and I can't find what makes one wrong and the other right, I pick one of the two, flag it, and MOVE ON. Come back to it at the end of the test with any extra time you have left.
@adzballroom it was timed in test day conditions!
Completely agree! I also think something that helped me a lot is framing everything into an argument which I saw JY do.
Example, if there was a complicated sentence that your uncertain of, I learned it’s not about what it means, it’s about how it fits into the paragraph and the passage.
This helped me stopped getting bogged down in details and also get a better low res summary
I'd also like to add that being able to translate the passage into words that you'd use to explain to a 7 year old helps as well! A lot of the jargon in RC is just so flamboyant and unncessary, and I've personally found eliminating that has helped me understand the points of a passage much more effectively
OP can you explain more on how you did this? RC has been my worst section