Reading Comp Passages

Martin01

I am struggling very bad with time issues regarding RC.

When it takes me around 12/15 minutes per passage, I get all of them correct or miss only one.

However, when I try to speed up my pace down to 10 minutes per passage, I do terrible.

My game plan was to get down to 10 minutes, then 8 minutes, so eventually I can get through all of the passages for June.

SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!!!

stepharizona

A good place to start with timing, is where are you spending your 12-15 minutes. Are you spending 6 -7 minutes in the passage? More? Or are you spending 3-4 minutes on the passage and 9-11 in the questions?

Maybe start with just knocking 1 minute off at a time. If you're spending a lot of time in the passage, perhaps diagramming or notating, see if you can knock a minute off there. It takes time to improve your pace, so make sure youre not being too hard on yourself.

Knowing more about where you are spending your 12-15 minutes will also help the community give you better advice on where to start chipping away at your time.

Cant Get Right

I’m guessing you’re probably not reading actively. Here’s an exercise.

Go outside the available RC material and get some scholarship to read. The introductions in the ubiquitous Penguin Classics or Modern Library Classics make great material for this. Get some political philosophy and science classics as well. Even novels will help depending on the author. A Hemingway might not be great for this, but someone like Faulkner or Joyce sure would be. So basically, get some books. Read them, stopping at the end of each paragraph. Summarize the paragraph out loud (Yes, out loud). Finally, reread it to see if you remembered everything. Don’t even worry about time. When you successfully recall ten consecutive paragraphs, start making kind of a Simon memory game out of it. So, read one paragraph, summarize it out loud, and reread to confirm you got it. Did you get it? Great! Now repeat but with two paragraphs. Every time you successfully recall everything, add another paragraph. Every time you suck, subtract a paragraph. See how far you can take it.

Compared to reading, LR and Games focus on skills that can be acquired. Reading is a skill that is more of a process of accumulation than acquisition. This exercise is a crash course, but it’s effective. The more you read, the more effective you’ll become.