understanding the sticky spots in RC (and letting urself do so)

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• beezmoof Alum Member

  October 2017 555 karma

  Also follow up q for anyone who has done the MM for a while, does anyone feel like following it causes you to lose out on understanding the substance, nuance and smaller details because you're so focused on the method?
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  inactive Alum Member

  October 2017 12637 karma

  Bumping this to the top.
• 2 Likes

  btate87 Alum Member

  October 2017 788 karma

  I'm in a current grind of RC studying and can struggle with this as well. How is your general RC performance? Are you struggling to finish all of the passages? How much does your accuracy suffer when you feel like you're rushing? That might help people have a better clue into what sort of advice to give.

  Some things that have helped me with some form of the problems you're mentioning (some of them you're probably already doing if you're following the Memory Method):
  1) Practice some early RC sections entirely untimed, and really break down those paragraphs/sentences that trip you up. Look for referential phrasing!!
  2) Do Not move onto another sentence until you understand exactly what the sentence you just read is telling you. This is super important in the first paragraph for most passages, or the confusion will compound itself as you go.
  3) 4) Always be asking the author why he/she is telling you this. This can be easy to do at the beginning or end of a passage, but trickier to remember when things get complicated in the middle. Take a moment when you hit these tough spots in an untimed setting to stop, ask yourself "Why did the author just tell me this?" And then back up and read the paragraph or sentences leading to the part that tripped you up.
  4) After you read once, write down what you think the main point is, and then read the entire passage again, and see if those tricky spots come into focus when you know what the author is telling you.

  You might go check out Corey's Active Reading Webinar from 2016. Parts of it might apply to your question.

  As for low res/high res, someone surely has a better answer than I can give you for this as I haven't put much thought into it. But for paragraphs that stump me when I go to summarize, I will sometimes go back to the passage and find which sentence(s) tell me the most about the paragraph, and use key words from that to orient my summary. Then I'll go back at the end and rephrase the more text-dependent summaries if I feel like I still don't have a strong grasp on it.

  As for losing understanding, I think it's kind of a nuanced answer, but ultimately no. There are definitely some details I miss, but if I have a firm understanding of the passage, then I know exactly where to look for them. You have to be careful about when you're not taking the time to understand details/nuance, though. If you're at a point in the passage that you don't know the main point yet, absolutely do not skimp on details - it could cause you to misinterpret something big like the author's position. Once you have a strong understanding of what the main point is, the details will likely be easier to comprehend as you go. If you feel like you're missing questions from details, maybe rely more heavily on the, "Don't go on to the next sentence until you understand what you just read," mindset. If I'm skipping some details, it is usually because it's a passage explaining something very dense to me, like how neurons work or something. I'm only going to let details slip away, though, if I know exactly why they're telling me this information - what is it's role in the argument? Then, if questions go into those details, I know where to look and I'm fairly well oriented when I dive back in.

  Finally, I think you'll find some answers as you just do more sections. You'll start to anticipate what sorts of details will show up in the questions on your first read through, and, if you're really digging into the MM, you'll start to grasp the structure of the passage more thoroughly.
• beezmoof Alum Member

  October 2017 555 karma

  Much appreciated @btate87 !!!!
• 4 Likes

  Seeking Perfection Alum Member

  October 2017 4428 karma

  I never did the whole low res and high res summary thing, but I always felt that the longer I spent reading and thinking about the passage relative to pondering the questions, the better and quicker I performed. So I would recommend spending as much time as feasible with the passages up front before hitting the questions.
• FerdaFresh Alum Member

  October 2017 561 karma

  I second @"Seeking Perfection" !