Experts' Topic of the Week, 5/22/17: Ultimate RC Guide for Beginners

GMAT Ninja's RC Guide for Beginners

Back when we used to do regular Wednesday chat-room sessions (archives are available here), one of the most common questions was always short and blunt: “How can I improve on reading comprehension?”

I wish that there was a quick, easy answer to that question, but as is often the case on the GMAT, there are no magic bullets. Instead, here’s an honest, long(!), BS-free guide to getting started with GMAT RC.

Read for structure and purpose

Unless you’re totally new to the GMAT, you’ve probably noticed that the GMAT always asks contextual questions about each RC passage. You’ll always see main idea or primary purpose questions on your actual exam, and if you’re scoring at a relatively high level, even the “detail questions” aren’t solely about details on the GMAT. GMAT RC questions won’t, for example, ask you to repeat what line 27 says, but you might have to explain the role that line 27 plays in the author’s overall argument.

So what’s your first job when you read an RC 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: 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 the previous paragraphs. 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 questions that you’ll inevitably see next.

Don’t obsess over details

Here’s one of the worst tactical errors you can make on RC: if you’re trying to memorize all of the facts, you’re both wasting your time and missing the point of reading comprehension. Or, to paraphrase Ron Purewal (see this thread), if you’re reading “as though the passages were just factfactfactfact”, you’re not going to succeed on RC.

Again: GMAT RC questions will always ask you to synthesize the author’s overall argument. You’ll rarely be asked to just regurgitate 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. And it’s completely fine if you miss a few details, as long as you can still comprehend the overall purpose behind each paragraph.

If you struggle to understand a few sentences here or there, 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 there’s no reason to obsess over a few difficult phrases or sentences.

In other words: if you can understand the purpose of the paragraph without catching every single detail of the nastiest sentences, you win.

Get engaged

But here’s the thing: no matter what, you have to be engaged and alert and attentive when you read. Many of you have solved thousands of algebra questions in your lives, and you might be able to solve a basic equation while literally half-asleep. That’s not how reading works: if you’re not awake, engaged, and conscious ALL of the time when you do RC, you’ll miss something important.

Many of you have heard this advice already: pretend that you’re interested whenever you read an RC passage. If that works for you, awesome.

Or maybe this one will work better: whenever you read an RC passage, pretend that a beautiful man or woman (whichever you prefer!) is reading the passage to you in a dimly lit bar. If that does the trick for you, great.

And if not? Well, maybe note-taking will help.

So what about note-taking?

I wish that I could tell you that there’s ONE correct way to take notes on GMAT RC. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. Everybody is different. 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 (“kinesthetic learners”, if you like jargon). Other people disengage when they start taking notes, and they actually get worse at reading.

So 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 passage. If you’re just writing "factfactfactfactfact" on your page, you’re probably missing the important things: WHY the has author written each paragraph, and how those paragraphs connect. Mindless, detail-oriented notes are probably not going to help you.

Most of my students end up taking minimal notes – roughly 8-12 words per paragraph – just to remind them to engage in the purpose of each paragraph. If you do better without taking notes, that’s great: just make sure that you’re focused on WHY the author has written each paragraph, and how the paragraphs connect.

And if you want to take more notes on RC, that’s 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”?

No skimming, no gimmicks

There's some great test-taking advice out there for RC (see the links below), but please beware of silly, oversimplified RC “tricks.” Some people will suggest that you should skim the passages, or at least some parts of them. Please don’t do this. It’s true that you don't need to understand every single detail in the 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, but skipping random pieces of the passage definitely won’t help.

I’ve also heard that it’s a good idea to read the question before reading the passage, and I don’t think that’s going to help much, either: each RC passage has three or four questions, but you can only see the first one. I’ve never really understood how reading just ONE of the questions can possibly make you more accurate at comprehending the passage.

There’s a seemingly endless supply of these RC gimmicks. One test-prep company once claimed that (D) is much more likely to be the answer than other answer choices. Sorry, that’s not true. I occasionally meet people who think that they can read just the first and last sentences of each paragraph. Sorry, that’s not going to work, either.

The bottom line: if an RC “trick” sounds too good to be true, it certainly is.

Don’t fall in love

Whenever you do anything on the GMAT verbal section, you should always look for four wrong answers – not one right answer. If you try to take shortcuts with this process, I can promise that you’ll make mistakes, especially on relatively difficult questions.

The easiest mistake to make on GMAT RC (or CR!) is this: you read the question, and an answer pops into your head. You immediately notice that, say, answer choice (B) sounds an awful lot like what you were thinking. So you choose (B), and you don’t really read (C), (D), or (E).

Meanwhile, there’s some little tiny modifier in (B) that makes it wrong. One word can completely change the meaning of an answer choice, right? But if you fall in love with (B) immediately – and fail to use process of elimination – you can easily make a careless error. And careless errors on easy questions can quickly ruin your day on an adaptive test.

So don’t fall in love. Instead, always 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 an adaptive test, that’s an investment that you absolutely need to make, on every single verbal question.

Stick with official 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 RC practice. Many of you have heard this already, but the GMAT spends between $1500 and $3000 developing each official GMAT question, and even the very best test-prep companies can’t compete. (Including, of course, the two-man empire known as GMAT Ninja. We write our own questions, too. We think we’re good at it. You still shouldn't rely on them too heavily.)

On RC, 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 aren’t the same thing. So use the official GMAT materials wisely, and if you need extra RC practice, you might consider trying some LSAT questions.

Improving your fundamental reading skills

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 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 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, all of the strategy guides in the world might not help.

If this applies to you, that’s OK: turn your attention to improving your fundamental reading skills in English. The best way to do that is to read challenging stuff. Every day. This article will get you started with some general approaches to leisure reading and some nonfiction recommendations, and this one explains why reading fiction is a good idea. But 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.

The other piece of bad news is that doing a lot of reading is a long-run strategy: if you’re 10 days away from your GMAT exam, reading a few magazines at night isn’t going to immediately cure your problems. But over the long haul, the best way to get better at reading is to read more.

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 (in the U.S., English coursework is required from Kindergarten through 12th grade, and generally in the first year of university). So if you need six months or a year to improve your reading skills, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Extra hope for non-native speakers!

I know: spending months or years improving your reading skills isn’t easy. But for whatever it’s worth, if you haven’t been exposed to many GMAT-style texts in English, you probably have some room to improve relatively quickly.

I’m the first to admit that it can be really difficult to improve on the GMAT verbal section, but I’ve met countless test-takers over the years who have managed to gain 10+ points on the verbal section. And the overwhelming majority of them are non-native speakers. And that’s the silver lining to taking this nasty exam in a foreign language: you might still have plenty of room to improve.

So keep at it! And if you need more resources, GMAT Club has your back.

Want more?

• All GMAT Ninja LIVE YouTube videos by topic (including RC)
• GMAT Ninja’s Guide to Leisure Reading, Part 1: How Nonfiction Can Help Your GMAT Score
• GMAT Ninja’s Guide to Leisure Reading, Part 2: The Benefits of Reading Fiction to Improve Your GMAT Score
• Carcass’s verbal question bank and directories
• What to do about timing on GMAT verbal
• Compilation of RC tips & strategies by BB
• One of my all-time favorite posts on RC, courtesy of Carcass and Ron
• Using LSAT materials for extra practice on CR and RC
• BB’s long-running thread about the best books to read
• A short and interesting post about gmatexam439 's efforts to improve his reading skills
• Carcass's list of favorite magazines and periodicals