Quick Tip

Diagram in Pen

Many students diagram Logic Games in pencil, reasoning that they may make mistakes and want to erase them. I’d advise against this for a couple of reasons. First, erasing can make a board quite messy, since erasure marks can take up a large portion of the page and, when written over, can be hard to read. Second, you may accidentally erase something you wanted to keep! Third, erasing takes time! This may slow you down. I’d advise writing in pen and, in the event of a mistake, just crossing out that board and writing it over again.

Discussion

Improving Reading Skills

It’s no secret that reading is vitally important to the LSAT and, unfortunately, is one of the most challenging skills to improve. How do you become a better reader? As you may have suspected, much of our skills as readers are already set; we’ve been reading since childhood and you probably won’t have a reading epiphany overnight. 

However, the primary LSAT-specific reading skill that is assessed is screening out irrelevant information. This skill can be improved in a couple of key ways.

First, refine your note-taking method. A gift on the LSAT is that each RC passage is the same length (plus/minus a few words), which means you can build a note-taking method that is completely uniform, regardless of the section. Keep drilling this and find an optimal time that allows you to absorb the material without getting bogged down. The low-res technique of writing down 5-7 key words in each paragraph is also strong—it forces you to be very selective, picking your words carefully to capture the big ideas.

Second, read material that is substantively and structurally similar to what you might encounter on the LSAT. RC passages tend to be roughly college-level passages that you might encounter in a newspaper or academic journal. So, you should practice by reading similar sources! I always recommend The Economist since it’s fairly interdisciplinary, spanning science, art, law, and the humanities. When reading real-world pieces, pretend it’s an LSAT and quiz yourself as you go on what you’ve read and on the structure. For example, you could finish a short article and ask yourself, “What was the main point?” “How might I strengthen this argument?” etc.

Third, learn “sentence clues” for irrelevant (or less important) information. I always tell my students to train themselves to read more quickly on embedded clauses, which they can return to after. I also advise them to speed up on information within em dashes or parentheses, which will likely be explanatory. Finally, when several commas rapidly come in order, I note for my students that this will often be a “laundry list” of examples that can be referred back to later.

These tactics won’t make you a better reader per se, but they can help you adapt your lifelong reading skills to the specific tasks that the LSAT demands.