Specific ways to increase LR

Jahn.Snow

Hi all!

I feel like I'm stuck in a rut with my studying. I've been FP LG which has been really helpful, but with LR I find myself scoring worse than I did when I first started studying.

What are some specific actions/ methods you used in seeing increases in LR? How did you realize what wasn't working and what did you do to get past it? How does LR studying look for you? Do you take PTs, drill, BR?

I hope to get some inspiration and guidance on how to see consistent improvements. Thanks in advance!

sebramirez

I think the most important thing is to know what the conclusion is, how the argument tries to support it, and try to identify the flaw/gap in thinking. Once I did that, repeating out that information to myself out loud before going into the questions, it helped.

I did tons of drills of question types I had issues with until it became clear.

FaviPapi-1-1

Without timing yourself, take some questions and do them. You should get about 90% of them right; otherwise, you need to sharpen your skills. After that, you can start doing time sections, which will probably mess your Yin and Yang flow...

Good luck!

seriously

I not only BR every question I found challenging/missed on a PT, but I also type out explanations for each question. I gather these explanations from 3-4 different websites. Then, I print out my explanations and review them every day for a week, taking notes in the margins to ensure I'm engaged. As soon as I started doing this, my PT scores jumped by about 5 points, and I saw particularly big jumps in LR. I highly recommend this method!

whatsmyname

Do questions by type then you'll begin to see parallels and become more efficient at filtering the necessary info.

Sometimes I wont even read the entire passage, only scan for key words and structures.

Jahn.Snow

@sebramirez @FaviPapi @seriously @whatsmyname thank you guys so much! I'm going to try and implement the tips you've mentioned here

sebramirez

@"Jahn.Snow" if you ever have more questions or whatever, inbox is always open!

Kris4444

Second what @sebramirez said. Once I started stripping the stimulus down to it's bare-bone "X is a good reason to believe Y." It got a lot easier to look at the argument more critically and analyze why X may or may not be a good reason to believe Y.

Also honing my skipping strategy made doing timed sections a lot less stressful.

lizzogonzo

Was totally in the same boat and only recently have I seen improvements. One thing that helped was that I stopped looking for the answer in the answer choices. The answer was in the stimulus. In other words, stick to the passage. Train your eyes to find the gaps in the author's arguments. Avoid skimming the passage, make sure you understand it or else you will risk getting the answer wrong or worse, getting stuck between the right answer and the trap answer. Keep a wrong answer journal, write down why you missed it and how to avoid making the same mistake next time. Finally, just keep drilling but with intention, don't just drill to get through stuff and say you studied because the PTs are a finite studying resource, you wanna make good use of them.

A lot of ^^^ what I just said came from Loopholes by Ellen Cassidy. I found it a really good supplement to the 7sage curriculum. Apparently some people think it's overrated but personally, I do not click well with how 7sage teaches LR so the way that book is broken down is super helpful for me in conceptualizing the LR section.