Check out this picture:
Yes. You feel that sense of accomplishment. It feels like you've actually done something. Instead of emptiness, you feel like you're leaving a giant (colorful and scribbly) footprint behind the pages that you've mastered. It feels good. I know - I've been there.
But in all honesty, it is a huge waste of time. What really matters after reading any LSAT reading comp passage isn't that you've completely and utterly mastered identifying, for example, the list of reasons why the dolphins died off. You're not being tested on facts or how much you can remember from the RC passage.
The key, according to Kent Lawless, from LSAC, to doing well on the RC passage is to keep the big picture in mind while working your way through the details. I agree with him.
Here's what most people don't realize - the RC passages in the LSAT were written by some think-tank Ph.D in Newton, PA, which is where LSAC is headquartered. It's NOT merely an abridged excerpt from some book/magazine. This means that you'll have to assume that the written works in the RC passages are actually good writing.
When folks read, they often forget about the elements of good writing. Indeed, reading and writing are two very different tasks, but if you put yourself in the writers shoes, then as a reader, you'll extract and analyze more efficiently.
Here's my case in point - Topic Sentences. Topic sentences give you a great window into what the entire paragraph is going to be about. Most LSAT students, however, breeze through these topic sentences without giving much though into them. In fact, some students don't really wake up or focus until mid-paragraph.
Even if for a few nano-seconds, I tell my students to get behind the "eight-ball" and predict how the entire paragraph is going to "go down" after reading the Topic Sentence. It forces you to be an active reader. It's quite efficient. You will be surprised at how accurate your predictions might be. And if you're prediction is wrong, then you'll be all the more intrigued by how the author takes twists and turns.
Reading and predicting based on Topic Sentences, will also help you keep the big picture in mind. You'll learn to treat each paragraph in units, and then (hopefully) you can learn to think about with the entire passage based on the interaction between these units. This helps you NOT get bogged down by details.
Here's what most people don't realize - the RC passages in the LSAT were written by some think-tank Ph.D in Newton, PA, which is where LSAC is headquartered. It's NOT merely an abridged excerpt from some book/magazine. This means that you'll have to assume that the written works in the RC passages are actually good writing.
When folks read, they often forget about the elements of good writing. Indeed, reading and writing are two very different tasks, but if you put yourself in the writers shoes, then as a reader, you'll extract and analyze more efficiently.
Here's my case in point - Topic Sentences. Topic sentences give you a great window into what the entire paragraph is going to be about. Most LSAT students, however, breeze through these topic sentences without giving much though into them. In fact, some students don't really wake up or focus until mid-paragraph.
Even if for a few nano-seconds, I tell my students to get behind the "eight-ball" and predict how the entire paragraph is going to "go down" after reading the Topic Sentence. It forces you to be an active reader. It's quite efficient. You will be surprised at how accurate your predictions might be. And if you're prediction is wrong, then you'll be all the more intrigued by how the author takes twists and turns.
Reading and predicting based on Topic Sentences, will also help you keep the big picture in mind. You'll learn to treat each paragraph in units, and then (hopefully) you can learn to think about with the entire passage based on the interaction between these units. This helps you NOT get bogged down by details.
No comments:
Post a Comment