I'm often asked by students "How can I improve my reading comprehension skills?" or "How
can I improve my speed of reading to help me on the LSAT and specifically on the reading
comprehension section?" Well there's a number of short term solutions
and tricks and techniques that you can use to improve in all these areas of the LSAT.
But for the purpose of this video we're going to look at a longer term solution. So if you're
looking at this and you've got a couple of weeks to go before your LSAT it's probably
not going to help you out that much. But if you've got a month or more you can put these
techniques into practice and it's going to improve your ability to read analytically
and quickly to help improve your score on the LSAT and specifically on the reading comprehension
section. So the first thing I'd recommend in improving
your reading abilities is practice. Now it seems kind of obvious but there's specific
ways that you're going to practice your reading to improve on the LSAT, and that is, pick
up a copy of a newspaper or specifically a magazine a periodical, something with complex
text. I'd suggest "The Economist" the reason I like that is a lot of the topics included
in the articles in "The Economist" are similar to what you find on the LSAT. You'll find
things like: economics obviously and business but also social sciences, biological sciences
and even the arts. So all of these kind of things will get you familiar with these kind
of topics that may not be familiar to you from your undergrad in school and so you'll
be more prepared to deal with them when you come across these passages on the LSAT dealing
with these complex and unfamiliar topics. When you've got your copy of the newspaper
or "The Economist", you're going to have to pick up lots of these on a regular basis obviously,
you should be reading a couple of articles everyday at least. The great thing about this
kind of studying is it's not like your typical LSAT studying, you don't have to be sitting
in a quiet environment in the library, you can be doing it on the bus, before you go
to bed at night or pretty much anywhere, even in class if it's a particularly boring class.
So you're practicing you're reading these articles regularly throughout the day. You
cannot be reading in the way in which you normally read. You have to focus and that's
really the key here is you have to force yourself to focus when you're reading.
Have you ever been novel before going to bed at night, you get to the end of a page and
you realize, I have no idea what I just read. It happens to all of us but you have to avoid
this on the LSAT. You can't let that happen on the LSAT.
So some of the ways that you're going to avoid this is by employing the second half of your
brain. Putting it to work and forcing it to do something else. Now, when I say the second
half of your brain, I mean that part of your brain that's usually thinking about other
things. You're daydreaming, you're thinking about what you had for lunch today or that
hot date you've got tonight. You can't be thinking about those things. But in order
to stop that you have to give your brain something else to do. So what is it going to be doing?
It's going to be thinking about what you're reading, analyzing it, summarizing it, so
as you're reading you're going to be creating a short mental summary in your mind as to
what the general idea is of what I'm reading. But you're also going to focus on specific
points. Things like, what's the author's view point here, or what's the main point of this
whole article, what are they really getting at, or what kind of transitions are happening,
is the article taking one direction and then moving off in another direction, is it presenting
one idea and then coming at it and criticizing that idea or presenting the view point of
someone else and who is that someone else? These are the kind of things you're analyzing
and critiquing while you're reading through the article.
Another thing you can do to help yourself focus and to improve when you come to the
actual LSAT passages is to take some notes. So you're reading your newspaper article,
you're magazine article. Make notes. And what I mean by this is go through and actually
circle things, underline things, draw boxes, put in stars or draw arrows to important points.
You don't want to actually write out short hand notes on the side. Don't do that. But
just, actually just circle things that are there, underline them make stars, make notes
of things that are going on in the article. And the kind of things you're going to be
highlighting are the things we just identified that the second half of your brain is going
to be focusing on so things like your author's view point, the view points of other people
in the article, transition points or if you point out hey this sentence neatly summarizes
the main point, you definitely want to make a note of that.
So you're going through, you're reading, you're focusing, you're making notes on the article
as you're reading it. When you finish reading at some point later that day, you want to
take the time to explain this article to someone else. So grab a parent, grab a friend and
say "Hey I want to tell you about something I read today." Tell them about the article.
And this is going to force you to do a couple of things. This is going to force you to recall
it, so it's improving your memory. It's going to force you to summarize it, so it's improving
your ability to condense that complex text that you read and summarize it into something
a little bit more simple and it's also going to improve your ability to analyze it because
you're not going to just tell them what you read. You're going to tell them a little bit
about your opinion on it or some things that you thought. Maybe you thought there was a
problem with it or it didn't address this enough and so it's improving your analytical
abilities in analyzing this passage. And all of these things are essential skills for reading
on the LSAT and specifically for the reading comprehension section.
Just to give you a little bit more incentive to put these techniques into practice. When
you're doing this, reading through these articles, improving these analytical reading and speed
reading abilities, because you're actually going to become faster at reading if you force
yourself to read through articles regularly. Giving yourself these added abilities will
improve your LSAT score, but it'll also help you in the future because being an analytical
reader is something that is used by LSAT students or by law students on a regular basis. Every
day in law school you're going to have to read complex text and analyze what's going
on. And you're going to also use this as a lawyer. So put these skills into use and become
a better LSAT student and in the future, a better Law student and a better lawyer.
Well I hope this video helps you in your LSAT prep. If you're looking for more help, try
our full course. It's online and it's available at alpha-score.com