Studying for LSAT Reading Comprehension is tough. The passages are long, mostly about obscure topics that have almost no impact on your life, and are written with a heightened academic tone that is, frankly, boring. That doesn’t sound horrible, but imagine how your eyes glaze over while reading something you genuinely don’t want to. But fear not, because we’re going to explain a simple technique to help you stay awake and process what you’re reading even if you don’t want to. Let’s play tag.
Don’t Ignore Reading Comprehension
It’s rough out there studying Reading Comprehension. I can’t get mad at students who throw their hands up and mostly ignore that section, dedicating their time to mastering the more logically-demanding concepts of Logical Reasoning. Or students who “practice” Reading Comp, insofar as the practice involves doing passage after passage in the hopes of eventually, by happenstance or magic or just sheer brute force, getting better.
But neither of these approaches work, for obvious reasons. Even doing a ton of passages won’t lead to significant progress, if you’re not developing a sound approach to reading and comprehending these passages.
This is misguided for a bunch of reasons. First, the Reading Comp section on your LSAT will have more questions than any other scored section. You can expect between 26 and 28 questions on your RC section. On Logical Reasoning, that number will between 24 and 26.
Second, the dark logicians who write this test have made Reading Comp significantly more difficult on recent exams, and this trend shows no sign of abating.
This trend, by the way, is probably no accident but instead a response to test prep companies, like ours, that have developed and taught helpful strategies that have allowed test takers to master Logical Reasoning. The test writers, in response, have to increase the difficulty of the exam elsewhere. And they chose Reading Comp, which they probably see as more immune to the kind of LSAT prep strategies that work so well on the other sections.
Here’s the problem. The test writers are wrong about that. Now, there’s no equivalent to a concept like conditional statements or scenarios on Reading Comp—something that you can learn rather quickly and will pretty much guarantee you a ton of points on LR. However, there are important concepts that you can practice that can make you better at Reading Comp. And in my eyes, there is no concept more beneficial than making good tags.
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What Are LSAT Reading Comprehension Tags?
“Tags” are what we refer to as the notes that you make while reading a passage on your scratch paper. An effective set of tags will help you answer each type of question you’ll encounter on a Reading Comp passage. They will help you answer questions about the entire passage, including the organization and specific details.
Now, you might say you already have a system. As you read the passage, you start underlining things that seem important or noteworthy. Maybe if something seems really significant, you highlight it. Am I right?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. That system isn’t going to help you much. You’re probably underlining way too many things. If you underline or highlight over half of the passage, are you really doing anything? When you look back at the passage, nearly the entire passage is marked up, but you can’t tell what any of it means.
How To Create Reading Comp Tags
A lot of students, when they first start making tags, make a little tag for every sentence they read. There are many problems with this approach to tagging. First, it’s too time consuming. You have somewhere between 3-5 minutes to read the passage, which is not nearly enough time to write your own little Spark Notes version of the passage.
Second, writing something down after every single sentence actually breaks up the flow of reading the passage. You’ll be far too focused on the passage as a collection of discrete sentences, instead of seeing how everything works together to form an argument.
Finally, these tags will actually be too cluttered and specific to be useful when you go back to use them. You’ll have to read through too many things to find the salient detail to answer a question. Wouldn’t it be better if your tags instead quickly directed you to the relevant part of the passage?
Ideally, you want to tag the structure of the passage. You want tags to display what role a given paragraph plays in the passage. You want to know, based on a tag, if that paragraph is providing a conclusion offered by the author or another party, or if that paragraph is offering evidence to support a conclusion. And you shouldn’t have more than one or two tags per paragraph.
Now, this might sound like a daunting feat, especially in the early goings of your studies, when you’re still learning the ins and outs of argumentation. When you’re starting out, approach it this way: Read a paragraph (or, if it’s a lengthy paragraph, read until you sense there’s a natural breaking point in the paragraph). Then think about what you would title that paragraph if it were your job to give each paragraph a title or a header. Doing so will force you to think more structurally about the paragraph, and will yield a tag that tells you exactly what role that paragraph plays. Pro-tip: Most paragraphs have a topic sentence that will tell you, more or less, what function that paragraph is going to play.
These structural tags will serve several functions. They’ll help you answer the big-picture questions. If you’ve tagged each conclusion in the passage, you’ll know immediately how many viewpoints were offered in the passage and where to find those viewpoints. And if you’ve noted in your tags which conclusion is the author’s, you’ll have answered the main point question already. They’ll help you answer questions about the organization of the passage. There’ll be questions that ask you what role a paragraph plays. If you already figured this out with your tags, you’ll have that answer ready to go. And finally, they’ll help you answer the questions about specific details. When you have to go back to the passage to answer a detail-oriented question, your tags will direct your attention to the relevant paragraph where you’ll find that answer.
And best of all, you can get better at tagging in a short amount of time. Like a lot better. And it’ll keep you engaged as you read dry and uninteresting passages. And you’ll make those test writers, who were gambling on you not being prepared for a tough Reading Comp section, look foolish.
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