Slow Reader

[missbernadette]

One of my biggest problem on Reading Comp. seems to be the pace of my reading. I try to notate what I think is important and I try to use P.E.A.R. and think of the scale, which does help me. However, it seems like every time I take a timed reading comp. session, by the time I have five minutes remaining, I still have another passage left in that section. I'm losing valuable points and I feel frustrated with this section Any tips?

[bbirdwell]

Hey Bernadette,

Just like we talked about in class last night, here are a few tips:

Think about where time is wasted. Most likely you could read the passages a little faster, and also, you probably waste the most time on just a couple of questions that you really get hung up on.

So, in order to practice speed, first practice awareness. Be aware of where your time goes, and learn to make a decision and move on when you get stuck on a particular problem.

Do sprint drills. Give yourself 5 or 6 minutes each to do a few RC passages/questions. You'll learn a lot about what you can do when you don't have the luxury of indulging in over-thinking and going back and forth from the passage to the choices a hundred times.

Take fewer notes. Very few people notate too little. Look back at previous work to see what you've underlined and circled and noted. Check out the questions. How much of what you noted was actually relevant? What are the patterns? More often than not, people take too many notes regarding details like dates and names, etc. Remember, structure is the most important thing. When you take notes for a passage, you should not be taking the kinds of notes that would help you summarize the passage for a book report. You should taking the kinds of notes that help you analyze the passage like an argument from Logical Reasoning -- what are the conclusions and gist of the evidence? That's about all you need -- far less detail regarding the evidence than you might at first believe.

Practice elimination skills. Hone your ability to see wrong answers, especially wrong answers that fit the common patterns we discussed last night. The biggest difference between skilled test-takers and unskilled test-takers is not how fast they read the passage, it's how fast they eliminate 2 or 3 wrong answers.

Hope that helps. The key to improvement is more than just doing problems. You'll have to analyze your old work and spend a lot of slow time dissecting choices to really begin to understand the test itself, and how this section works.

Do some reflecting and experimenting and let us know how it goes!