RC HELP

suzyalcantar97

Hi everyone,
I was wondering how some of you were able to improve your Reading Comp skills? I’ve been studying for months and have improved in both LR and LG both have seen little improvement in RC. I’m still getting 3 questions per passage wrong at times. In particular I know I have trouble with Author Attitudes questions but also in general seem to be picking answers that are rather too broad or too specific depending on the question.

Forever Addicted to Coffee

Hi there, I had the same, if not similar, questions as you a few weeks back. The answer seems to depend on why you are getting those wrong. What is it about the questions that you got wrong that stumped you? In other words, how did the passage/question fool you?

For me, my problems come from the detail-relevant questions (inference, purpose of word, etc...) rather than the big-picture questions (main point, purpose, etc...). So I have been developing an annotation strategy with highlighting that works with the digital RC. It seems to take me 30 more seconds to get through the passage but the highlighted text seems to help me a) read with more precision and b) allow for easier referencing of the text.

My accuracy has been going up steadily on 4 to 5 star passages with my highlighting strategy, and I am still developing it. The BR process seems to be easier with this method as well.

So my advice for you would be a) self-diagnose and analyze your problems, b) identify several ways that you can improve yourself, and c) experiment with what seems to work best for you.

I hope that helps--please let me know if you need any clarifications.

99thPercentileOrDieTryin

I prefer the low-res method. I neither annotate nor highlight; I simply memorize the very basic info by summarizing at the end of each paragraph. Then, at the end of the passage, I silently recap all of it and summarize the main point before going on to the questions. By using this method, it's pretty easy to remember where specific info is and how each paragraph relates to the others.

Example using an article about a blue artist...(this is how I would summarize in my mind)

P1. artist background
P2. Style development
P3. Influence on modern music
P4. Author opinion
MP: Blues artist highly influenced modern music; not given enough credit.

The hard part is training your mind to actively translate and distill the LSAT's language as you read. However, if you can master this method, I think it was useful for me.

Forever Addicted to Coffee

@99thPercentileOrDieTryin said:
I prefer the low-res method. I neither annotate nor highlight; I simply memorize the very basic info by summarizing at the end of each paragraph. Then, at the end of the passage, I silently recap all of it and summarize the main point before going on to the questions. By using this method, it's pretty easy to remember where specific info is and how each paragraph relates to the others.

Example using an article about a blue artist...(this is how I would summarize in my mind)

P1. artist background
P2. Style development
P3. Influence on modern music
P4. Author opinion
MP: Blues artist highly influenced modern music; not given enough credit.

The hard part is training your mind to actively translate and distill the LSAT's language as you read. However, if you can master this method, I think it was useful for me.

I should mention that I started off by doing something like this, which is why I do not have issues with big-picture questions that rely on your understanding of the tone, structure, main point, various view points, and etc. It just goes to show that the RC section is very dependent on the individual!

99thPercentileOrDieTryin

@"Forever Addicted to Coffee" said:

I should mention that I started off by doing something like this, which is why I do not have issues with big-picture questions that rely on your understanding of the tone, structure, main point, various view points, and etc. It just goes to show that the RC section is very dependent on the individual!

Truth! For me, I tried annotating at first before finding my fit with low-res! The translation drill from The Loophole book is the study method I attribute most to my LR and RC score improvement. For specific info questions (meaning of word, etc...) I find it useful to back up three sentences prior to the specific word or phrase and read up through the sentence past the part-in-question. It worked for me. Try it out if you'd like. I think it's important to test your techniques to find what fits your style best.

suzyalcantar97

Hi @"Forever Addicted to Coffee" and @99thPercentileOrDieTryin thank you so much for your advice! @"Forever Addicted to Coffee" Would you recommend highlighting words that indicate Author's Attitude, I tend to miss it at times when reading. I end up having an idea of what is but once I go into questions I tend to chose something that is out of scope, not something the author exactly would agree with, or not exactly how you would accurately describe their tone.

Forever Addicted to Coffee

@suzyalcantar97 said:
Hi @"Forever Addicted to Coffee" and @99thPercentileOrDieTryin thank you so much for your advice! @"Forever Addicted to Coffee" Would you recommend highlighting words that indicate Author's Attitude, I tend to miss it at times when reading. I end up having an idea of what is but once I go into questions I tend to chose something that is out of scope, not something the author exactly would agree with, or not exactly how you would accurately describe their tone.

Hi Suzy,

The highlighting should be very specifically tailored to you. In order to develop something that may help you highlight the author's attitude, I suggest you do the following:

1) Revisit an old RC section timed. Read the passage under 4 minutes without highlighting.
2) Write down the low-resolution summary of each paragraph.
3) Write down the main point, tone, structure, and purpose of the passage.
4) Move onto the questions timed.
5) Blind review the questions. Here, you want to take a highlighter and highlight anything on the passage that wold have helped you go through the questions.

For example, I get to question 3 on my blind review. I circled this question. It happens to ask about the author's opinion on concept X. I forgot where to look for this concept. The concept X was mentioned in paragraph 2 line 15. If I had that highlighted during my timed run, it would have been easier for me to reference this concept X as I went through the questions.

Another example, I get to question 4 on my blind review. I circled this question. It happens to ask about the critic's opinion on concept Y. What was it? I don't remember this at all. It turns out that this concept Y was buried within paragraph 3 line 24. If I had that highlighted during my timed run, it would have forced me to digest it more as I went through the passage timed.

So to conclude, if you want to incorporate highlighting, I suggest you work backwards to train yourself on when to highlight, which color to use, and what is/is not important to highlight.

I suggest that you do this for 5-10 RC passages and evaluate. Is the highlighting really worth the extra time? Am I finishing the passage on time? Is it beneficial across most passage types or is it really only good for a specific type?

And finally, one note of caution. Highlighting should NOT supplant comprehension. In other words, you are highlighting in order to aid in comprehension, rather than highlighting to just get a superficial glance at something that sounds important but you have no idea how that relates to the structure, opinions, and purpose of the passage.

I hope that helps--I am still developing my annotation style to fit my needs. So my advice should NOT be taken as an absolute truth.

suzyalcantar97

@"Forever Addicted to Coffee" Hi again, Thank you for the detailed advice it will be helpful! I will try something similar to this and see what I need to modify to fit my needs.