Reading Comprehension

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  adriana_b Core Member

  August 4 198 karma

  active reading!!!! went from consistently missing around 12 per section to 5 or less- simply by changing the way i was reading (as someone who has never liked reading). i saw a tip somewhere that essentially told me to trick myself into enjoying the passage. like hey, i get to learn something new! also, unless it's a difficult science passage, usually the passages themselves are not entirely difficult- just make sure you're thinking about what you're reading and trying to retain as much info as possible (though don't feel too overwhelmed, the passages will always be there). try and come up with a short, one sentence summary of each paragraph as you finish them. it makes it a lot easier to remember the content and also piece all of the parts together to form the main idea. once you begin to actively read, the questions are super easy! (as most of them pertain to content directly from the passages) u got this
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  spittingnickels Live Member

  August 9 186 karma

  I'd start reading challenging material. I was reading the economist like everyone else for a while , but it wasn't helping me in RC. Then I started reading philosophy books and my ability to read rc blasted off. So just challenge yourself more. Dry and boring reading material will become interesting if you can make it interesting for yourself. I'd love to read fiction everyday but it doesn't help you on RC. It just isn't hard enough. RC can become interesting if you make yourself interested in it
• ntrepanier5 Alum Member

  August 9 323 karma

  A few of my own thoughts:

  -There's this really helpful study method I found on a forum post that's a few years old (scroll to the top to find what I'm talking abt - I think the hyperlink takes you to a random comment): https://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/26560/my-guide-to-reading-comprehension-part-1-long-ish-post

  -Like adriana said, active reading is key. I've found the highlight function helps me stay engaged. A lot of people use the various highlighting tools to note viewpoints, or main ideas, or tricky details they think will come up later. I more just highlight important ideas as they come up to keep myself engaged rather than to specifically revisit them later on in the passage, but everyone has their own method. More than anything, I think just doing lots and lots of RC sections helps. Every once in a while you're gonna have a section you do poorly on, but over the long haul you can get your accuracy up by just seeing lots of questions and passages - seeing how the question / passage writers like to structure things

  -Like spittingnickels said, read challenging material. I've read some challenging material in college, but the LSAT is a very different type of reading. Most of the time in school you're reading for content or argument, whereas the LSAT wants you to pay very special attention to STRUCTURE and PURPOSE. Yes there are a lot of must be true questions in RC like "What does the Author mean by this word?" or "The passage provides sufficient information to answer which of the following questions?" but a lot of the harder RC questions (for me at least) come from understanding the author's thought process beyond the explicit text of the passage: tough inferences, organizational intent, why they put certain sentences where, etc.

  --Maybe it's just me, but I've found that reading academic works by specifically British authors has helped. I think it's helped me stay on my toes and not know what's coming next because their diction, sentence structure, and style of writing are just slightly different than American authors.