Hey Fellow 7-Sagers,
I'm a slow reader. I'm struggling with time-management on LR quiz practice questions. I'm unable to complete the quizzes within the allotted 15-minutes. I am,however, getting the questions I do answer correct. I've been reading magazines such as The Economist and The Atlantic, but I've yet to see any increases in my reading speed. When I purposely try to speed up, my accuracy suffers. Any tips on increasing reading speed while maintaining accuracy? I know this problem will be a factor on other sections, especially RC. Thank you.
Comments
As for getting faster, I think it comes down to getting better at being able to organize information in your head in terms of hierarchy. One sentence in a paragraph probably has the main idea, while the rest are more like supporting details. Getting faster requires being able to prioritize information efficiently. At least, that's how I see it.
If the combination of these things does NOT yield quantifiable increases in speed, then that can indicate a shortfall in understanding, mental discipline, and/or bad habits (in plenty of cases it's all three). That's one of the benefits of quantifying time per question; then it's a matter of taking a hard look at your actual habits in real time (under time pressure), reviewing lessons, asking questions on the forums, and perhaps looking into attention/focus strategies.
I actually think Lumosity ($12 or so per month, totally worth it) helps honing these lattermost skills on a mechanical level.
JY does it for RC passages if you look at him doing LSAT 70.
But don't just do this for passages - do it for everything - games, LR, reading answer choices...
Helps with Speed AND Accuracy
It's not necessarily bad to "lightly" underline, but not necessary and the added "drag" might add up in time. Watch JY do a passage in PT 70 to see what I mean.
If it is really about pure reading speed, that time will be over 35 minutes. However, In my experience and with the three people I've had do this so far, the time was actually well below 35 minutes (I'd expect around 25-30 minutes for most people). These three that I was tutoring were also worried that they were simply too slow at reading, and that was the problem.
I suggest that often this is not a problem of slow reading, but of lacking an efficient process to deal with other time sucking activities. For example, picking between two answer choices, I found, was a really easy way for me to waste minutes on a single question. I'd go back and forth reading the two answer choices without having a clear path forward. I simply hoped that something would pop out at me from the answer choices.
It's easy to blame reading speed, but reading speed is something that is super hard to change. It can be done, but it is much easier to simply develop habits of checking answers against the stimulus instead of against one another and having an internal clock that tells you when it's time to move on from a question.
Last thing is that often people will inactively read the stimulus rather than specifically search for conclusion and support. This slows you down as well.
Good luck! I worry that the method of tracking your reading via your pencil might slow you down and prevent you from connecting aspects of the stimulus that are in physically separate locations. It will probably help you focus, but just be cognizant of missing the forest for the trees when doing this. I'd encourage you to try spreeder as well, if you are really worried that your reading speed is insufficient.
Also, speed comes from time. I've notice that the amount it takes me to read a Q stem & stimulus is a lot faster now compared to 7 months ago (when I first started studying).
I'm also pretty sure that the more you dwell on a question, the more likely you are to get in wrong.