Hi everyone!
Over time some of the most frequently asked questions I have seen on the sub and elsewhere is a concern about whether or not reading comprehension is conquerable. I’ve even seen students ask if it is simply impossible to improve on RC.
Good news: it is possible to improve on RC! Accordingly, here are two great strategies that students often have success with for analyzing the passage:
A) Highlighting main points and author’s opinion method
This is the first strategy I experimented with at the beginning of my studies. While I did find it helpful and some students certainly benefit from it, I was kind of an aggressive highlighter and would run into difficulty trying to parse out why I highlighted what I did. Another con is that some students find highlighting on the Lawhub interface awkward, which is a valid complaint. Nonetheless, it can still be helpful for some students, and may be worth a shot!
B) Paraphrasing each paragraph (and taking notes of author’s opinion) method
This is the strategy that I ended up settling on for passage analysis, which after practicing extensively took me down to -0/-1 on RC. After reading each paragraph in the passage, you come up with a 4-7 word summary that you write down on your scratch sheet of paper. By doing this, you are not only developing an outline of the passage, but also forcing your brain to engage and process the main point of the text. The whole idea of this method is to cut out the noise of each paragraph so you can get a feel for its main role in the overall passage.
For example, I have a background in the social sciences. The other day I read a passage about radioactive isotopes and honestly, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about them. Guess what though: I didn’t need to have outside knowledge of what a radioactive isotope is! I needed to know why the author brought it up in the first place. Precisely what this method help us figure out.
On Reading Comprehension we are primarily reading for structure and purpose. This is why it’s so important to have a strategy to deconstruct and understand the passages.
Using either one of these strategies will take a lot of untimed and timed practice, but it’s worth a try if you feel you’ve hit a wall on RC.
Recently, I even had a student try out the paraphrasing method for the first time and they improved to an all time high of -3 on the RC section they did.
One final note about RC: Remember that every single right answer is justified by the passage, and the four wrong answers simply are not. Spend some quality time on RC untimed so you can reinforce the reality I bolded above. One of the few advantages the student has on RC is that the right answer has to be reflective of the passage, and the four wrong answers are not!
Mastering RC is a huge part of what made my 177 possible. I noticed there aren’t too many free RC resources out there, so I hope this was a helpful overview of different ways to tackle this infamous section of the test. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!