How fast should I be at Reading Comprehension?

Mihael K.

I'm doing the RC problem sets of the core curriculum currently and it seems like the RC passages are taking me a while. For passages that are 5 questions it takes me 10 minutes to complete that passage, and for passages that are 7-8 questions it usually takes me 15 minutes to complete.

How do I get faster at this? And what is a good time to aim for for each passage?

taschasp

If you're just getting through CC, I would recommend you not worry too much about timing at first, and focus more on reading properly: asking the right questions while you read, reading for reasoning structure and purpose, anticipating what the author is going to say next, taking pauses to connect ideas together and to things you already know in life... that last part is important because if you make it more concrete and relate it to things you already know, you're more likely to keep the passage in your short-term memory so that it's still there when you get to the questions.

Only once you've done a good amount of practicing do I think you should start worrying more about timing. At that point, if you find you constantly have to go back to the passage to answer every question, it could mean you're actually spending insufficient time on the passage upfront, which costs you more time later on constantly going back to the passage. Or, you might be getting stuck too much on small details, and need to work more on reading for structure so that you can more quickly return to the passage when you really need to and avoid doing so the rest of the time.

But for now... think of it like learning to play a piece of music on an instrument. First, you might have to slow down the tempo and learn to play it slowly, and then gradually increase the tempo until you're up to speed. It's the same idea with RC (and LR and LG).

The Great White Shark

@taschasp said:
If you're just getting through CC, I would recommend you not worry too much about timing at first, and focus more on reading properly: asking the right questions while you read, reading for reasoning structure and purpose, anticipating what the author is going to say next, taking pauses to connect ideas together and to things you already know in life... that last part is important because if you make it more concrete and relate it to things you already know, you're more likely to keep the passage in your short-term memory so that it's still there when you get to the questions.

Only once you've done a good amount of practicing do I think you should start worrying more about timing. At that point, if you find you constantly have to go back to the passage to answer every question, it could mean you're actually spending insufficient time on the passage upfront, which costs you more time later on constantly going back to the passage. Or, you might be getting stuck too much on small details, and need to work more on reading for structure so that you can more quickly return to the passage when you really need to and avoid doing so the rest of the time.

But for now... think of it like learning to play a piece of music on an instrument. First, you might have to slow down the tempo and learn to play it slowly, and then gradually increase the tempo until you're up to speed. It's the same idea with RC (and LR and LG).

That last paragraph is such a good analogy!

Cant Get Right

@taschasp said:
If you're just getting through CC, I would recommend you not worry too much about timing at first, and focus more on reading properly: asking the right questions while you read, reading for reasoning structure and purpose, anticipating what the author is going to say next, taking pauses to connect ideas together and to things you already know in life... that last part is important because if you make it more concrete and relate it to things you already know, you're more likely to keep the passage in your short-term memory so that it's still there when you get to the questions.

Only once you've done a good amount of practicing do I think you should start worrying more about timing. At that point, if you find you constantly have to go back to the passage to answer every question, it could mean you're actually spending insufficient time on the passage upfront, which costs you more time later on constantly going back to the passage. Or, you might be getting stuck too much on small details, and need to work more on reading for structure so that you can more quickly return to the passage when you really need to and avoid doing so the rest of the time.

But for now... think of it like learning to play a piece of music on an instrument. First, you might have to slow down the tempo and learn to play it slowly, and then gradually increase the tempo until you're up to speed. It's the same idea with RC (and LR and LG).

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up. I only want to add to extend the metaphor which is really great. I attended a class with Christian Lindberg who is widely considered one of the greatest trombonists of all time, and someone asked him how he learned to play Flight of the Bumblebee at tempo. He said he started slow--just whatever he could manage--and as he mastered it at slower speeds, he found he could ratchet it up a little bit more. Eventually, he was at tempo, but he never worked on it that way.

Jonathan Wang

The nominal reason I'm posting is to highlight that there is such a thing as going too fast, so you need to be very careful once you return to actively trying to pick up your pace that you aren't sacrificing your newly developed skills to do so.

But really, as a violinist myself, I'm all about the classical music life and I just wanted an excuse to share this other take on Flight of the Bumblebee:

Be like the dude from CGR's post, but don't take it as far as this guy.

Jonathan Wang

Oh and this guy is even worse :

This is like when Kaplan tells you to read the first and last sentences of each paragraph in RC and it'll be enough.

FindingSage

@"Jonathan Wang" said:

This is like when Kaplan tells you to read the first and last sentences of each paragraph in RC and it'll be enough.

That is why I asked the Kaplan instructor to repeat what he said three times when he said to only read the first and last sentence on RC and that would be enough to understand. Between that and another sesssion of logic games where they didn't like that I split the game board and solved for all possiblities ( I was apparently supposed to be using work from previous questions or something like that), I saw that Kaplan was just full of gimmicks and tricks and I was looking for true understanding.

Seriously, though, @"Mihael K." I know that people approach RC different ways but there are no real gimmicks or tricks for Reading Comp. When you are just starting go as slow as it takes to understand. I actually took some of the paragraphs and translated them into plain English, and still do that every once in awhile when blind reviewing a really hard passage and feeling like I "missed" something. I have had to spend some much more time on RC than I ever expected, I originally thought the section would be easy lol. During practice start with Reading Comp passages untimed, take the time to go back to the passage when you are answering questions that sound like according to the passage... Read activley, asking yourself how the sentece you just read relates to the sentence previous, the direction the next sentece and passage as a whole may be going. It is totally okay for your prediction to be wrong, the bigger point of this is for you to be engaged and interested in the passage rather than just skimming.

For example, when I read a science passage and then I read a hypothesis I am expecting the author to say that a previous hypothesis is wrong and why another one is better or perhaps introduce multiple hypothesis and reconcile them by the end of the passage. As you do more RC some of this will start to look a lot more familiar and as you get more comfortable and confident the speed will come.