Beginners’ Guide to LSAT Reading Comprehension
On an almost daily basis, we’re asked the question: “How can I improve on LSAT Reading Comprehension?” (Also common: “How can I improve on Logical Reasoning?”)
We wish that we had a quick, easy answer to that question, but as is often the case on the LSAT, there are no magic bullets. Instead, here’s an honest, long(!), BS-free guide to getting started with LSAT Reading Comprehension.
READ FOR STRUCTURE AND PURPOSE ON LSAT RC
Unless you’re totally new to the test, you’ve probably noticed that the LSAT always asks contextual questions about each RC passage. You’ll always see main idea or primary purpose questions on your LSAT exam, and even the “detail questions” aren’t solely about details on the LSAT.
LSAT RC questions won’t, for example, ask you to regurgitate what line 34 says, but you might have to explain the role that line 34 plays in the author’s overall argument.
So what’s your first job when you see a LSAT Reading Comprehension passage? Understand the structure of the author’s overall argument, and WHY the author has written each part of the passage.
Here’s the basic structure that we recommend to our LSAT students: stop at the end of each paragraph, and ask yourself WHY the author has written the paragraph. Your focus should be on the big picture: each paragraph’s purpose and how each paragraph connects with that of the previous paragraph(s).
If you’re crystal-clear about WHY the author has written every paragraph – and how they fit together – you’ll be in great shape for the contextual RC questions that you’ll inevitably see next.
DON’T OBSESS OVER DETAILS ON LSAT Reading Comprehension
Here’s one of the worst tactical errors you can make on LSAT RC: if you’re trying to memorize all of the facts in a passage, you’re both wasting your time and missing the point of Reading Comprehension.
Again: LSAT RC questions will always ask you to synthesize the author’s overall argument. You’ll rarely be asked to just repeat facts.
Just as importantly, the facts will always be on the screen when you need them. There’s no reason to memorize all of them, or obsess over them, or write them all down, especially since the LSAT is ludicrously time-pressured. It’s completely fine if you miss a few details, as long as you can still comprehend the overall purpose behind each paragraph – and frankly, if you’re NOT missing some of the details on your first reading, you’re probably burning valuable time.
If you struggle to understand a few sentences here or there in an LSAT RC passage, check to see if you still understand how the paragraph connects with the author’s overall argument. If you still understand WHY the author wrote that paragraph – and how it fits in with the rest of the passage – then just keep moving, without letting your focus or energy dip. There’s no reason to obsess over a few difficult phrases or sentences.
In other words: if you can efficiently understand the purpose of the paragraph without catching every single detail of the nastiest sentences, you win.
WHAT ABOUT NOTE-TAKING ON LSAT RC?
We wish that we could tell you that there’s ONE correct way to take notes on LSAT Reading Comprehension.
Unfortunately, that would be a lie. Everybody is different, especially when they’re pressured into answering roughly 25 LSAT questions in 35 minutes. Some people are much better at reading when they take tons of notes, because the physical act of writing something down helps them engage in the material. Other people disengage when they start taking notes, and they actually get worse at reading – or at least much slower.
As LSAT tutors, we know that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. Different strokes for different folks.
The thing that matters: if you’re going to take notes, make sure that they’re rooted in the big picture of the RC passage. If you’re just writing "factfactfactfactfact" on your page, you’re probably missing the important things: WHY the author has written each paragraph, and how those paragraphs connect. Mindless, detail-filled notes are definitely not going to help you on the LSAT.
If you’re relatively new to the LSAT, remember again that the exam is outrageously time-pressured, and you simply don’t have time to take notes unless you’re 100% sure that they’re helping you.
About half of our tutoring students end up taking minimal notes on LSAT Reading Comprehension passages – roughly 8-12 words per paragraph – just to remind them to engage in the purpose of each paragraph. If you do better on Reading Comprehension without taking notes, that’s great: just make sure that you remain focused on WHY the author has written each paragraph, and how the paragraphs connect.
And if you want to take more notes on LSAT RC, that can be OK, too. Just keep asking yourself: are these notes helping you comprehend the structure and purpose of the passage, or are you falling into the abyss of writing “factfactfactfactfactfactfact”?
You have zero time to waste on LSAT RC. So if you feel that you need to take notes – but you’re not sure that your note-taking habits are helping – keep experimenting until you find an efficient note-taking style that works well for YOU.
SKIMMING & GIMMICKS NEVER WORK ON LSAT RC
There's some great test-taking advice out there for LSAT Reading Comprehension, but beware of silly, oversimplified RC “tricks.”
Some people will suggest that you should skim the passages, or skip some parts of them. Please don’t do this. It’s true that you don't need to understand every single detail in every LSAT passage, but you’ll get absolutely nowhere if you skip random pieces of the passage. You won’t know which sections are important until you actually try to read them.
So here’s the bad news: yes, you really do have to read the whole passage. You don't have to understand every single detail – and frankly, you’re wasting time if you obsess over details – but skipping random pieces of the passage definitely won’t help.
Some LSAT tutors recommend reading the first question before reading the passage, and that’s not going to help much either, since each LSAT Reading Comprehension passage has five to seven questions. I’ve never really understood how reading just ONE of the questions can possibly make you more accurate at comprehending the passage. And it makes absolutely no sense to spend your time reading all of the questions ahead of time.
There’s a seemingly endless supply of these LSAT RC gimmicks. For example, a large, well-known test-prep company claimed for decades that (D) is much more likely to be correct on the LSAT than the other answer choices. Sorry, that’s not true.
We also occasionally meet people who think that they can read just the first and last sentences of each paragraph, and one of our all-time favorite GMAT students thought that it would be wise to read RC passages backwards. Sorry, those things aren’t going to work, either.
The bottom line: if an LSAT Reading Comprehension “trick” sounds too good to be true, it certainly is.
DON’T FALL IN LOVE ON LSAT Reading comprehension
Whenever you do anything on the LSAT verbal section, you should always look for four wrong answers – not one right answer. If you try to take shortcuts with this process, we can promise that you’ll make mistakes, especially on relatively difficult questions.
The easiest mistake to make on LSAT RC (or LR!) is this: you read the question, and an answer pops into your head. You immediately notice that, say, answer choice (A) sounds an awful lot like what you were thinking. So you choose (A), and you don’t really read (B), (C), (D), or (E).
Meanwhile, there’s some little tiny modifier in (A) that makes it wrong. One word can completely change the meaning of an answer choice on the LSAT, right? But if you fall in love with (A) immediately – and fail to use the process of elimination – you can easily make a careless error. And careless errors on easy questions can quickly ruin your day on the LSAT.
So don’t fall in love. Instead, make sure that you’ve found four wrong answers, not one right answer. Unfortunately, this means that you’ll have to read every answer choice if you want to eliminate four of them. But on a test like the LSAT, that’s an investment that’s absolutely worthwhile.
KEEP MOVING ON LSAT Reading comprehension
Most test-takers would agree that the worst thing about LSAT Reading Comprehension is that it’s miserably time-pressured. If you’re looking for an elite LSAT score, it isn’t enough just to be an accurate reader – you also have to maintain that accuracy while reading really, really quickly.
We’ll be brutally honest: to a large extent, your reading speed is already “baked in” by the time you’re an adult, and if you’re fundamentally a slow reader, you’ll struggle to achieve an elite LSAT score. But regardless of your innate reading speed, you’ll still want to think of the LSAT as an exercise in efficiency and optimization. If you can’t answer all 25 (or so) Reading Comprehension questions as thoroughly as you’d ideally like – and very few people can – then how can you best allocate your 35 minutes to maximize your accuracy?
One simple-sounding thing that you can do in order to maximize your LSAT RC performance: don’t obsess over any particular sentence or paragraph, and definitely don’t obsess over any individual answer choice. If you start to feel stuck on a question, make your best guess, mark the question, and come back to it if you have time at the end of the section. That might sound silly, but it’s unbelievably easy to get stuck as you bounce between two answer choices and the passage itself for several minutes – and it’s never worthwhile to spend that much time on a single LSAT question.
So keep this in the front of your mind: no single question will make or break your law school prospects, so if you start to feel stuck on an LSAT RC question, guess and keep moving.
STICK WITH OFFICIAL LSAT RC PASSAGES
We have endless respect for our friends in the test-prep world who do their very best to write good, “non-official” questions, but we strongly recommend relying primarily on official questions for your LSAT Reading Comprehension practice. Every LSAT question goes through a ridiculously thorough vetting process, and it can take three or more years for a question to go from the initial writing phase to an actual appearance on the LSAT. It costs thousands of dollars to produce each actual, official LSAT question, and even the very best test-prep companies can’t compete. (Including the tutors here at GMAT Ninja. We write our own questions, too. We think we’re good at it. You still shouldn't rely on them.)
On LSAT Reading Comprehension, official passages are loaded with subtle little twists of language, and your task is to get used to catching those subtleties. Non-official passages simply can’t mimic that level of subtlety. So use the official LSAT materials wisely; there are around 80 published tests on LawHub with one Reading Comprehension section per test, and there are a few extra, official tests in older LSAT books such as this one.
IMPROVING YOUR LSAT READING SPEED & PRECISION
So you might be thinking: “Um, Ninja guy, I’m already doing basically everything you recommend. It’s not helping. I’m still unhappy with my LSAT RC scores. What should I do?”
The bad news: the real reason you’re struggling MIGHT be that your reading skills simply aren’t as strong as you’d like them to be. You can follow every LSAT test-prep guru in the world and execute on every strategy that we have to offer. But if you’re struggling to understand the precise meaning of the passages and answer choices – or if you’re struggling to do so quickly – all of the best LSAT strategy guides in the world might not help.
If this applies to you, you might want to turn your attention to improving your fundamental reading skills. The best way to do that is to read challenging stuff. Every day. With 100% concentration and energy, with the goal of pushing the envelope on both your speed and your comprehension. Almost any high-quality reading material is fine, as long as the language is sophisticated enough to push your boundaries as a reader – so no comic books, I guess.
Want some recommendations? Check out our fiction or nonfiction reading lists to help you improve on LSAT Reading Comprehension.
The other piece of bad news is that doing a lot of reading is a long-run strategy: if you’re 10 weeks away from your LSAT exam, reading a few magazines at night isn’t going to immediately cure your weaknesses on LSAT Reading Comprehension. But over the long haul, the best way to get better at reading is simply to read more. Just make sure that you’re keeping your intensity level dialed up to 100% if you’re preparing for the LSAT, since the test requires you to read at such high speeds.
If it helps, think of it this way: college-educated native speakers have generally had at least 14 years of formal reading and literature instruction, starting from a very young age. So if you need six months or a year to improve your reading skills for the LSAT, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?
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